Quote of the Day (Robert Bloch, on a Vampire’s Cloak)

“The cold, heavy cloth hung draped about Henderson’s shoulders. The faint odor rose mustily in his nostrils as he stepped back and surveyed himself in the mirror. The lamp was poor, but Henderson saw that the cloak effected a striking transformation in his appearance. His long face seemed thinner, his eyes were accentuated in the facial pallor heightened by the somber cloak he wore. It was a big, black shroud….

“The old man took the money, blinking, and drew the cloak from Henderson’s shoulders. When it slid away he felt suddenly warm again. It must be cold in the basement—the cloth was icy.”—Robert Bloch, “The Cloak,” in American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps, edited by Peter Straub (Library of America, 2009)

Right about now would be a great time for Henderson to high-tail it away from that cold, dusty costumer’s shop (better to buy this at home, on eBay, where the one in the accompanying image came from) and its shuffling, ancient, yellow-eyed owner. But this is Halloween night, and Henderson badly wants a monster’s costume to frighten his friend Lindstrom and his silly society friends.

More to the point, this vampire’s cloak makes Henderson look better—a huge selling point to a colossally arrogant narcissist.

On the other hand, most readers like myself don’t want Henderson to run away, as it would deprive us of a chance to see a modern master of the macabre at work, especially at his tongue-in-cheek best.

The decades immediately before and after World War II represent a godsend for readers of genre fiction. Devotees of detective, science, and supernatural/fantasy fiction could turn to all sorts of magazines—especially the pulps—and find terrific short stories, turned out by masters such as Ellery Queen, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, and H.P. Lovecraft, to name a few. The last of these was a major influence on the writer of “The Cloak,” Robert Bloch, born on this date in Chicago in 1917.

Bloch is known best today for the novel Psycho, which furnished Alfred Hitchcock with the raw material for a bravura exercise in the art of pure filmmaking. But his talent for horror hardly ended there. In a prior post, I alluded to a terrific Bloch short story, “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” which featured Sherlock Holmes on the trail of the serial killer.

When I saw this particular story in American Fantastic Tales, I knew I had to buy this Library of America anthology—even though it also has such classic genre (and non-genre) authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Lovecraft.

Bloch might have looked initially to Lovecraft (who first encouraged the teenaged neophyte writer to contribute to Weird Tales) as a model, but by the time he wrote this for Unknown, at age 22, he had developed his own unique style. 

Take, for instance, the opening of this tale: “The sun was dying, and its blood spattered the sky as it crept into a sepulcher behind the hills. The keening wind sent the dry, fallen leaves scurrying toward the west, as though hastening them to the funeral of the sun.”

Henderson, seeing the change in the atmosphere, can only ask why he has to waste his time thinking about "cheap imagery." Bloch is sending up one of the conventions of the horror genre--establish a sense of atmosphere--even as he's about to reinforce it. Henderson is so concerned about his own silly errand that he ignores unmistakable signs (including that the window into the costumer's shop looks like "a fissure into hell") that he is in an environment where his very sense of self will be radically destabilized.

Forget Edward and Bella, kids—if you really want a vampire tale to sink your teeth into, this is the one.

(By the way, I had remembered Henderson as being an actor, but that is never given as his profession in the story—the one reference I found to something like this concerned college theatricals in which he appeared.  I’ve since learned, however, that in his own adaptation of the story, part of The House That Dripped Blood (1971), Bloch made the connection obvious by turning Henderson into a horror movie actor. That could only have accentuated the humor running throughout the tale.)