Synopsis
Subterrean Press (1999) (HB)
Of Pennies, Pulps and Penury by David J. Schow
Foreword by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
The Devil With You
Strictly From Mars
It Happened Tomorrow
The Big Binge
An Hour With Robert Bloch (Interview conducted by David J. Schow)
Reviews
Best known for his movie-spawning novel Psycho, Bloch was a prolific writer whose career spanned seven decades. This compilation of four early novellas is not, however, so much a preservation of literary greatness as it is a pleasurable plunge into the last days of the pulp era. As Schow explains in his introduction, "This material is not supposed to be classic literature... yet, in a way, it is, because it easily accomplishes one of the criteria: It presents an honest snapshot of its time." Bloch's proclivity for puns and general slapstick runs at full tilt in "The Devil with You!" (1950), in which inebriated magicians romp through a thin plot set in a hotel replete with supernatural goings-on. Liquor fuels the characters of "The Big Binge" (1955) as well; coach Buster Gutz, psychiatrist Perry Noid and his niece Ada propel a plot that involves skewed psychotherapy, a machine called "The Psychopathfinder," Communist spies, nude women and vampires. Both novellas showcase Bloch's comic side, where the scary is delightfully subsumed by the silly. Bloch's horrific tale of alien invasion, "Strictly from Mars" (1948), also features a wise-cracking, hard-drinking hero, but its humor is edged with enough serious paranoia to make one see why it was effectively chilling in its day. The oldest story in the collection, "It Happened Tomorrow" (1943), is a sober, detailed take on a doomsday machines-take-over-the-world scenario. The first in a series of volumes on rarely reprinted Blochnalia, this collection by no means represents the best of the author's work, but it does capture the variety of his style and thus adds immeasurably to an overall appreciation of Bloch's influence on fantasy and modern horror.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The once brightly amusing but now departed Bloch faxes in some lost pages from the beyond and shows himself still going strong. This sheaf of what critics call hackwork (Blochs term is ``professional writing'') from the 1940s and '50s will appeal to those readers, admittedly fewer and fewer, who recall the youthful authors wonderfully funny Lefty Feep stories in '30s fantasy pulps. The material here includes four short novelsThe Devil with You, Strictly from Mars, It Happened Tomorrow, and The Big Bingeall introduced by editor Schow, who tells of penny-a-word pulps, and research assistant Stefan R. Dzieminnowics, who places Bloch's burlesques in the higher plateaus of pulpdom. It Happened Tomorrow is a fairly somber tale about future machines in revolt and the end of the world generally. The Big Binge starts out with Miner Klopp drinking four grasshoppers (a crme de menthe concoction); the events that ensue, Bloch says in an interview with Schow, ``strain my credulity to the point where it may have to wear a truss.'' Strictly from Mars is a wisecracking exercise in SF paranoia, while The Devil Take You, the longest story here, clearly shows Bloch blocking out pages at a thousand words an hourit must have been the fickle ringer of Fate'' was a tired phrase even then. Still, if fans can collect the Lost Three Stooges episodes, why not first puns and parodies? -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Bloch was pretty much the last of the pulp writers, who embraced wordsmith rather than author as a label because, in the 1920s to 1950s, they churned out horror, sf, fantasy, mysteries, crime thrillers, and even westerns for cheap magazines with names like Weird Tales and Fantastic Adventures. Such phenomenal productivity means that, though Bloch published many books, there are still stories moldering uncollected in yellowing pulp pages. Hence the series of which this is the first volume. It contains two short and two long stories, first published between 1943 and 1955. Of the shorter pair, "Strictly from Mars" combines alien invasion and fear of psychiatry, while "It Happened Tomorrow" is about what happens when machines gain intelligence (it ain't pretty). The others, "The Devil with You!" and "The Big Binge," are prime examples of Bloch's forte, the humorous strange story. Sodden with puns and booze, loaded with smart-alecky characters, they are the literary equivalents of Three Stooges comedies--an acquired taste that an ungodly number of readers actually have acquired. Ray Olson
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