Four rough gems from Bloch’s prolific pulp era.

The Devil With You!: Bill Dawson takes a two-week vacation and heads to New York City. Roped into playing a dice game, Dawson wins the hotel he is staying in. Just in time to witness the otherworldly chaos unleashed by the Magician’s Convention being held in the very same hotel…

Strictly from Mars: Pulp writer Dan Kenny staggers home from a booze soaked meeting with an editor and falls into one of his own science fiction stories. Mars is calling and they want help conquering the Earth…

It Happened Tomorrow: Dick Sheldon is jarred from an alcohol induced slumber by his alarm clock, which will not stop ringing. Sheldon soon learns that it is not just his alarm clock. Every machine in the city seems to have gone haywire…

The Big Binge: Elmer Klopp just wanted to drown his just below average sorrows. Instead he becomes the guinea pig for the latest breakthrough in psychiatric treatment…

Although justifiably famous for his novel Psycho, and countless other tales of psychological terror, there was more to Robert Bloch than his ability to curdle a reader’s blood. He could also get the reader laughing, if he were to choose to do so. Those who were lucky enough to know Bloch all spoke glowingly of the late Grandmaster’s ability with puns and jokes.

Two of the four pulp stories collected in this volume give the reader an idea of just how funny Robert Bloch could be.

The first comedic story, and first of the collection, is The Devil With You! A chaotic, Keystone Kops style romp through a dizzying amount of plot twists and zaniness. If there is a down side to the story, is that it is so breathlessly paced it almost becomes exhausting. Almost.

The second comedic offering is The Big Binge, a novel length delight that ends the anthology on a high note. It is a much stronger work than The Devil With You! As Bloch allows for a few down moments between the comedic shenanigans. Doing this allows both the story’s characters and its readers a moment to catch their breath, before he shoots them off into another hilarious debacle. 

Between these two comedic escapades are two tales that play things a tad more straight.

Strictly from Mars is an almost Philip K. Dick level mind game. I could not tell, until the very end, whether or not the Martian threat was all in Dan Kenny’s mind, or if it were real.

In his foreword, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz describes It Happened Tomorrow as beating to the punch the kind of dark, pessimistic end of the world style scenarios detailed in Richard Matheson’s Mad House, Stephen King’s short story Trucks, and even The Twilight Zone episode A Thing About Machines. King’s maligned cinematic misfire Maximum Overdrive is quite conspicuous in its absence, despite Bloch’s tale reading as what the film might have been like if King and jettisoned his over the top humor and “moron movie” approach and played the scenario as dead serious. Bloch did and the story is a deliciously chilling work of gradually escalating horror.

Long out of print, I hope that The Lost Bloch can become available again. The genre would be richer for it.