Robert Bloch

Lore & Background

Robert Bloch was born in Chicago to Raphael Bloch, a bank cashier, and Stella Loeb, a social worker, both of German Jewish descent. When he was five, his family moved to Maywood, a Chicago suburb, where he lived until age ten. At eight, he attended a screening of The Phantom of the Opera (1925) alone at night; the scene of Lon Chaney removing his mask terrified him and sparked his interest in horror. He was a precocious child, placed in fourth grade at age eight, and obtained a pass to the adult section of the public library, where he read extensively. In 1929, after his father lost his bank job, the family moved to Milwaukee, where Bloch attended Lincoln High School and met lifelong friend Harold Gauer. Gauer, editor of the school's literary magazine The Quill, accepted Bloch's first published short story, a horror story titled 'The Thing'. Both graduated in 1934 during the Great Depression.

Bloch began his professional writing career immediately after high school at age seventeen. He was an avid reader of Weird Tales magazine, which he discovered at age ten. H. P. Lovecraft became one of his favorite writers, and Bloch wrote a fan letter to Lovecraft in 1933, leading to a correspondence in which Lovecraft encouraged his talent and offered advice. Bloch's first professional sales, at age seventeen, were the short stories 'The Feast in the Abbey' and 'The Secret in the Tomb' to Weird Tales. His early stories were strongly influenced by Lovecraft and extended the Cthulhu Mythos, inventing texts such as De Vermis Mysteriis and Cultes des Goules. Bloch later specialized in crime and horror stories emphasizing psychological aspects of characters.

Reader's Guide

Robert Bloch's significance lies in his transition from emulating H. P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror to forging a distinctive voice in psychological horror and crime fiction. His novel Psycho (1959) became a cultural landmark through Alfred Hitchcock's film adaptation, cementing Bloch's place in popular culture. Bloch's career spanned sixty years, during which he wrote hundreds of short stories and over thirty novels, contributed to pulp magazines like Weird Tales, and worked extensively in television and film. He won the Hugo Award for his story 'That Hell-Bound Train', the Bram Stoker Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He served as president of the Mystery Writers of America in 1970 and was a member of several professional organizations, including the Science Fiction Writers of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 2008, the Library of America selected his essay 'The Shambles of Ed Gein' for inclusion in a retrospective of American true crime. Bloch's work has been adapted into films, television productions, comics, and audiobooks, and his favorites among his own novels included The Kidnapper, The Star Stalker, Psycho, Night-World, and Strange Eons.