Marvel Comics sequential art adaptations, and secondhand paperbacks which mixed his stories in among those from other writers whose careers began and flourished during the pulp-magazine era, were my introduction to the punning prose of Robert Bloch. With an eye-catching cover illustrating "That Hell-Bound Train", the Ballantine/Del Rey Books The Best of Robert Bloch was the first collection I purchased of his work, which introduced me to the ironic resolutions to his science fiction tales. I was also thus acquainted with Bloch's psychologically-driven fiction (most famously, of course, in Psycho) and his early involvement in the Cthulhu Mythos.
My favorite Bloch moment of my youth was reading "The Head Man" in a vintage anthology during,
I think, high school. That tale of witchcraft targeting the Third Reich and of mixed-up severed heads had me roaring with laughter.
Even with all of the subsequent Bloch that I've collected and read, I realize that I've only experienced a fragment of his literary legacy, not even counting his radio drama, teleplays and screeplays. I look forward to experiencing more of his more than half-century of work in coming decades, I hope in affordable, comprehensive editions.
The movie Psycho should not be his only headstone, given the extent of his contributions to several genres as well as his non-fiction.
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| Possibly Jeff's introduction to "The Head Man"... |
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| The 1975 Marvel large-format B&W reprint magazine issue where Jeff first read the Bloch and other adaptations detailed on the cover... |
