This year, I’ve been doing some research on horror author Robert Bloch for an upcoming project, so I was excited to see a recent announcement for UP Mississippi’s new book Psycho Century, which they’re promoting as “the first full literary biography of the writer who shaped modern horror from Lovecraft to King.”
The author, Bill Gillard, is an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh whose previous books include The Spark of Modernism: Twenty Speculative Stories and Writings That Defined and Era, 1886-1939 (McFarland 2023) and a collection of lost fiction by Evelyn Underhill (whose 1914 book Mysticism has always seemed indispensable to me). And now he’s written a book about an iconic horror writer, promising to situate Bloch’s work “within the larger landscape of twentieth-century horror while tracing how he continually reinvented his stories for new audiences in television and film.” I have attempted to do something similar for Stephen King’s work, so Bill Gillard is a man after my own heart and I came to Psycho Century with a strong predisposition to love it.
What I was expecting from the book was a deep dive into the connections between Bloch’s life and his stories. I went looking for something similar in Bloch’s 1993 autobiography, Once Around the Bloch, and in the 1995 tribute volume Robert Bloch: Appreciations of the Master (both sadly out of print). I learned that neither Bloch nor his peers were inclined to get too analytical—even though Bloch spent most of his career psychoanalyzing fictional and nonfictional sociopaths. Bloch freely (sometimes gleefully) admitted that there was a part of him that was equally sinister—but, by all accounts, the man behind the mask was a mensch. Much more interesting, then, to focus on his stories rather than his life, right? Except, for me, a writer’s life and art are always intertwined in endlessly fascinating ways.
Happily, Gillard’s perspective on Robert Bloch is informed by a treasure trove of relatively new (catalogued in 2024) primary research materials: the Robert Bloch Papers at the University of Wisconsin. According to the author, the donated materials filled nearly 400 boxes! The finding aid alone runs over 600 pages. Bloch was a shockingly prolific writer, and he apparently saved everything: manuscript drafts, journals, letters, research materials, clippings, memorabilia… With so much research material available, I can’t help thinking that a literary biographer should be able to get into Robert Bloch’s head as deeply as he got into the heads of his characters.
I realize that what I’m suggesting is a little mad. I attempted something similar with my biography of filmmaker Wes Craven, and I got lost down the rabbit hole for nearly four years. And I did not have access to ANY materials preserved by the Craven Estate. I slowly gathered rare documents and conducted over a hundred new interviews—to say nothing of all the secondary research—and produced a book that runs nearly five hundred pages. And yet, to me, it feels like a beginning.
The question that always haunts a book like this is “Who’s the audience and what are they looking for?” Speaking for myself, I love the fact that Bill Gillard reassesses—and reasserts—Bloch’s significance. Psycho Century effectively contextualizes Bloch’s work within the frameworks of American horror fiction (from Lovecraft to King) and film (from silent cinema to slasher movies). In relatively broad strokes, Gillard explains how Bloch’s voice and style evolved from cosmic horror to psychological / sociological horror, and how his evolution reflects the times in which he was writing. The big question is to what degree Bloch was leading and inspiring the changes that occurred over the course of the 20th century. If he was as influential as Gillard says, then we need many more books like this, to preserve and extend Bloch’s legacy.
Decades ago, Stephen King championed his literary predecessor in Danse Macabre, praising Bloch’s contributions to the TV series Thriller, as well as his “unholy trinity” of early-60s suspense novels (The Scarf, Psycho, and The Dead Beat). He also drew attention to later novels, including Firebug and Strange Eons, and cited Bloch’s short story “Sweets to the Sweet” as one of the five biggest influences on him as a writer. That short story was adapted to the screen in the 1971 film The House That Dripped Blood, one of several horror anthology films scripted by Bloch for Amicus Productions—and another big influence on King (specifically, Creepshow). Having such a significant influence on King should guarantee Bloch his place in horror history… so how is it that his work has been so neglected in recent years? Bloch died in 1994, and by the end of the millennium much of his work—not to mention the handful of books about him—was out of print. The obvious exception, of course, was Psycho.
The result is that, in the 21st century, readers mostly know Robert Bloch as the author of Psycho, rather than as a seminal literary figure who authored more than 30 novels and 100 short stories over the course of five decades, and remained very popular with audiences for at least three of those decades. In 2024, Valancourt Books made a herculean effort to revitalize the author’s reputation by republishing six (so far) of his most highly-regarded works: The Opener of the Way, The Scarf, Pleasant Dreams, Strange Eons, The Night of the Ripper, and Midnight Pleasures. The publisher has vowed to keep releasing additional titles as long as readers are buying them.
A book like Psycho Century can only help the cause. For me, the most compelling sections of the book focus on Bloch’s later novels—Night-World, Strange Eons, The Night of the Ripper, Psycho 2 and Psycho House. I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t read the Psycho sequels, but Gillard’s summaries have convinced me that those books must have been a source of inspiration for filmmakers behind the ongoing Scream series as well as the recent Halloween reboots. (Much to his chagrin, Bloch was at one point given credit for the rise of the slasher film—but he should perhaps be recognized instead as originator of the anti-slasher narrative.)
I wish Gillard had spent more time with some of Bloch’s earlier and more obscure novels (The Will to Kill, The Kidnapper, The Dead Beat, Firebug, The Couch, Terror, The Star Stalker, Sneak Preview)… but, when dealing with a creator as prolific as Bloch, it’s almost impossible to be comprehensive. Gillard says right up front that Psycho Century does not aim at “completeness,” but focuses instead on a careful selection of stories that the author revised over the course of his career. This is a novel and worthwhile (if occasionally frustrating) approach to the material at hand. It allows the author to show how Bloch’s voice and visions, sensibilities and psyche changed over the course of his life, by illustrating the changes he willfully made to his own creations. In chapters on Bloch’s Amicus collaborations, for example, Gillard compares strikingly different versions of the stories “Waxworks” and “The Weird Tailor.”
At the outset of each chapter, Gillard lists “things to read and watch,” providing a starter kit for the uninitiated. There is also a chapter on the short stories that foreshadowed Psycho, and a chapter on Bloch’s contributions to the original Star Trek series. (I had no idea.) The goal of Psycho Century is to point readers and viewers toward Bloch’s work, either for the first time or with new context that will help fans see them with new eyes. Although I think the book falls short of being a “full literary biography” of Robert Bloch, it is still a very welcome guide for any serious horror fan.
I should add that Bill Gillard’s notes pointed me toward a Robert Bloch resource that I somehow managed to overlook—a 1986 monograph by Randall D. Larson, published as part of Starmont’s Readers Guide series.
I was already well-aware of Starmont, which in the 1980s published critical works by some of the best (Douglas E. Winter, Michael R. Collings, S.T. Joshi, Darrell Schweitzer, Tony Magistrale, Tyson Blue, et al). Sadly, most of Starmont’s works are long out of print. Thank the Elder Gods for Internet Archive. I found Larson’s book there, and found it very accessible—also, appropriately wry—overview Bloch’s literary universe. Larson doesn’t attempt to psychoanalyze the author, but he successfully analyzes Bloch’s work. Which reminds me of something that one of Wes Craven’s family members said to me: “The work is the true biography.”
Psycho Century: Robert Bloch, American Horror Master will be released by the University of Mississippi Press in October 2026. You can order it here:
https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/P/Psycho-Century
In the meantime, Bill Gillard is blogging about every single Robert Bloch short story, in chronological order, on the official Robert Bloch website. As I said, he’s a man after my own (disembodied) heart...
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