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Atoms and Evil - by Robert Bloch

Thirteen tales of once and future shock, from the genre Grand Master Robert Bloch!

Try This for Psis:  Professor Seine would like nothing more than to have his star psychic pupil, Frank Tallent, prove extrasensory perception skeptic Dr. Angus Welk wrong, once and for all.  Unfortunately Frank and Dr. Welk's daughter, Nora, have fallen in love, and Nora does not want her beloved father embarrassed by Frank Tallent's psychic talents.

Comfort Me, My Robot:  Henson wants to murder his wife, so he can alleviate some unwanted stress in their marriage and they can be happy again.  Which is the precise reason why 21st century scientists invented surrogate robots.

Talent:  Andrew Benson has the talent to imitate anyone and, it turns out, any thing.

The Professor Plays It Square:  A prestigious Professor of parapsychology "investigates" games of chance 

Block that Metaphor:  Vorm is a Mech, a cybernetic alien.  One that takes human metaphors a tad too literally.

Wheel and Deal:  An auto-erotic (i.e. female robot) dealership owner breaks in a new salesman.

You Got to Have Brains:  A strange inventor known only as Mr. Goofy claims to have a built a spaceship that only needs one thing to make it move.

You Could Be Wrong:  When Harry Jessup finally watches TV, he begins to realize just how truly fake the world around him has become.

Egghead:  In a conformist society there is a hefty price to be paid by the non-conformist, just ask Dick.  Better yet, don't.

Dead-End Doctor:  Dr. Howard Anson, the last psychiatrist on Earth, tries to find his place in a world of robots. 

Change of Heart:  A young man falls in love with a clockmaker's daughter.

Edifice Complex:  Wayne and Nora have come to Vergis IV to search for diamonds, what they find is a monstrous secret.

Constant Reader:  An exploration team discovers a planet without any life, but with a great deal of intelligence...

The cover of my Gold Medal paperback edition proudly, loudly and boldly states that this collection represents "Science Fantasy at its best!"  While such hyperbole is always debatable, if not extremely questionable, I am not all that inclined to argue with the statement, too much.  Robert Bloch was referred to as a Grand Master for numerous reasons, and Atoms and Evil contains several of them.

Even though the futurist technology and dystopian day-after-tomorrows in which the stories are set have become fairly dated (Egghead is set within the conform-or-else fascist police state that is the United States of America of 1978, and the metallic female robots of Wheel and Deal sound silly compared to what the sex dolls of today are like) Robert Bloch was never all that interested in writing about the toys.  He wrote about the people using the toys and about how the inner workings of the human mind could and would motivate a person to use or create those toys.  As sad as it is to say, the more things change, the more they really do seem to stay the same.  It is that simple truth that makes these thriteen tales retain a certain degree of freshness, although all of them are close to being sixty-plus years old..

But change a date and a cultural reference, or two, and any one of these stories in the collection could easily be imagined taking place today, or in our own not too distant future.  The worlds described in Comfort Me, My Robot, Wheel and Deal, You Could Be Wrong, Egghead, and even Dead-End Doctor are still easy to imagine and, once again, even though it is very sad to say and even sadder to admit, easy to relate to.

Not all of the thirteen stories collected in the book represent Bloch at the height of his storytelling abilities, though.  Some are just average slices of what is now thought of generic Twilight Zone era science-fantasy.  Try This For Psis, The Professor Plays It Square, and You Got to Have Brains, while culled from Bloch's famous comedic wordplay sandbox, are all fairly pedestrian.  I thought that Psis was the best of the trio, only because, unlike the other two stories, I could not figure out what the story's twist ending and/or punchline would turn out to be.  The other two I saw coming long before I reached the last line.  The very same thing can be said of the tragic love story Change of Heart, which, like Brains, reveals its twist ending in the title.

Which brings me to the monster stories.  I love monsters, so Talent, Edifice Complex, and Constant Reader brought joy to my reading world that the other ten stories could not.  I am not saying that these three tales were the best in the book.  (I think that Wheel and Deal, Egghead and You Could Be Wrong are the "best in show" for this particular collection.)  But my first true love has always been monster stories, and Talent, Edifice Complex, and Constant Reader all deliver great fun.  

One thing that I found very interesting was how Edifice and Reader both echoed another memorable Bloch story, The Bald-headed Mirage.  Edifice, Reader, and Mirage are all tales of small groups of space travellers that land on barren and "lifeless" planets that turn out to be not all that lifeless.  Each story serves as a beautiful example of how Bloch could take the same simple idea and turn into something fresh and fascinating, over and over again.

Which is why he is considered a Grand Master. 

Sneak Preview - by Robert Bloch

Although the dystopian futurist world that author Robert Bloch sets his science-fiction thriller Sneak Preview in has become a dated cliche, his social and political commentary, and satire, has aged quite well; despite his central theme having already been played out countless times before, in far better (and worse, to be fair) science-fiction novels, short stories, and films from the decade that preceded his novel's publication in 1971.

In his unauthorized autobiography, Once Around the Bloch, Robert Bloch stated outright that he had no real aptitude for science-fiction, a genre that he loved, and that his true strength as a writer was in telling tales of supernatural horror and, most famously, psychological suspense.  He could also concoct a mean pun and had a genuine talent for humor.  Every yarn he spun had at least one good zinger in it.  The zinger in Sneak Preview is an utterly unrelated to the plot digression (one of several) entitled, Flashback: Down Memory Lane.  It tells the tale of a poor traveler named Kenner and his delay plagued attempt to return home after a trip to Rio.  It is a masterful bit of writing that anyone who has ever traveled can relate to.

Lane is the last of eight "Flashbacks" that Bloch uses to pad out the first one hundred or so pages of Sneak Preview, which is only one hundred and ninety-two pages long.  Only one of them qualifies as science-fiction, and none of them have any connection whatsoever with the primary story they elongate.  

The Good Old Days, the first of the bunch, is more joke than story, while the second, Our Glorious Past, is a gruesome horror story about an unfortunate soldier's most inglorious of fates.  A Touch of Nostalgia, the third, is yet another horror story, about a funeral director that comes up with an enterprising idea of how to better profit from the new business being generated from a current, and escalating, war.  Remember When, the fourth, is a hilarious, and biting, dig at the neurotic foibles of human nature, something that Bloch excelled at, thus making it essential reading for any aficionado of Robert Bloch.  Old Home Week, the tale of a doomed astronaut, is the only "flashback" tale that truly qualifies as a science-fiction story.  That Old Time Religion, the penultimate flashback, contains the strongest thematic link with the short novel that it is padding to full novel length.  The tale of a spinster's life long attempt to connect with the confusing, distant, and hostile world around her, the story is Bloch at his most existential.  The brutal force of the ironic climax is like a fatal sucker punch to the gut.

But what of the short novel these stories are padding out?

Sneak Preview's primary story is that of Graham, a Space Opera "Talent" (an individual tasked with giving the post-apocalyptic and brainwashed masses safe and non-challenging escapist entertainment) whose creative imagination has awakened an urge to rebel against the status quo.  When he attempts to break out of his assigned Space Opera box, Graham is whisked away by the Psychos, the psycho-analyst elite that "program" (i.e. control) the peaceful thought processes of the populace.  (It is also an unfortunate name choice, as the term Psycho constantly reminded me of Bloch's far superior novel of the same name.)

Graham's rebellious adventure against the Psychos offers Bloch plenty of opportunities to both skewer and comment upon the cliches of the Space Opera - which he does, with obvious relish - while indulging in them at the same time.  The end result is a wildly uneven, albeit enjoyable on its own flawed terms, futurist dystopian thriller with a generous dollop of black humor.

Chamber of Horrors - by Robert Bloch

Twelve stories of psychological horror, crime, and the macabre by Robert Bloch, author of Psycho.

Over the years I have read more than a few Robert Bloch anthologies, or a short story of his that popped up in a magazine or collection.  So I have become familiar with his "standards," the classics that would be reprinted in "Best of" and "Classics of" anthologies over the years.  Of those, Chamber of Horrors gathers together The Head Hunter, the tale of a Nazi executioner who becomes obsessed with his work, The Screaming People, about an amnesiac's troubled dreams, and Frozen Fear, a vengeance from beyond the grave story that B-movie fans will remember from the Amicus anthology movie, Asylum.

But the new to me stories were just as much fun.  Pride Goes - has a wayward wife attempting the perfect murder, Fat Chance has a wayward husband doing likewise, (my, what a little gender reversal can do for a story), Two of a Kind revolves around a most odd job interview, and Untouchable has a racist and drunken "Ugly American" actor discovering the true meaning of the word.

While many of Bloch's stories had genre trappings, such as mad scientists, ghosts, zombies, and all manner of other supernaturally empowered beasties, it was the twist endings and macabre humor that lifted them to the level of greatness.  Bloch's ability to create fully developed characters with just a handful of descriptive sentences certainly helped.

Fans of quality suspense writing (Impractical Joker, The Unpardonable Crime, and the aforementioned Pride Goes - and Fat Chance, to name but a few, are more deeply rooted in the crime genre than they are horror) really need to search out the books of Robert Bloch.  They are essential reading.

Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow - by Robert Bloch

Twelve stories of the bizarre and unworldly from the pen of the incomparable Robert Bloch.

Robert Bloch is a writer that, to horror, science-fiction and fantasy fans, should need no introduction.  The man is nothing short of a legend.  For those of you who do not know who Robert Bloch is (and shame on you if you don't), he is best known as writing a little novel called Psycho.  That particular novel was made into a movie of some renown.

Bloch started writing in his teens, in the 1930s, and was fortunate enough to start a correspondence with another legendary horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft.  Not surprisingly, most of Bloch's early works were pastiches of Lovecraft's hyper-stylized writing.  Eventually Bloch found both his own voice and his own area of specialty.  While some of Bloch's stories dealt with innumerable bogeymen of old (vampires, ghosts, demons, et al) he was most successful in the corner of the genre that would eventually come to be called Psychological Horror.  Robert Bloch has the uncanny talent of being able to peel away all the artifice and pretense of the human psyche and expose the ugly truths that always lay beneath them.  He also was a whiz at crafting the twist ending.

While the lingo and time period setting of most of his stories may have faded into the past, his observations of human nature remain as potent today as they did forty to fifty years ago, when these stories were first written.  Just read The Funnel of God or Report on Sol III in this collection and tell me that I am wrong, with a straight face.

Bloch was also a huge fan of science-fiction and, despite its gruesome cover, Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow is a collection of his stories in that field.  Although most of the stories feature some science-fiction trappings, such as aliens (The Goddess of Wisdom, Report on Sol III, and F.O.B. Venus), space travel (The Bald-Headed Mirage), time travel (Crime Machine), and take place either in the future (A Toy for Juliette and Sales of a Deathman) or on some distant world or asteroid, the stories are all distinctly Bloch.  The true evil, and the weaknesses that allows that evil to triumph (some of the stories are quite horrific), lay entirely within the minds and personalities of the characters.  Humanity is and always will be its own worst enemy.

But if you've read Bloch, then you would already know that.  If you haven't, then you need to get to your local used bookstore and scour it shelves for Bloch's work (sadly, most of his stuff is out of print at this moment) and get caught up on your quality genre reading.