When Robert Bloch was a boy of fifteen, back in 1933, he began to correspond with H.P. Lovecraft, becoming one of the youngest of the members of the Lovecraft Circle, that band of aspiring or seasoned writers scattered across the country whose common links were their enthusiasm for macabre fiction in general and Weird Tales in particular, and their friendship with Lovecraft. Some, like Clark Ashton Smith, were professionals; others, like very young Bloch. raw amateurs. Over the years, some lasted, becoming popular Weird Tales contributors, and others faded into the background.

Bloch, of course, lasted. From his first published short story, The Feast in the Abbey, he went on to sell a grand total of eighty-five yarns to that magazine and competitors like Strange Stories. Some stories were written with one or another collaborator, a few were written under a pen name (Tarleton Fiske), but, as his last appearance in WT was in the issue dated January 1952, I submit that he had become a seasoned professional. After all, eighty-five stories in only seventeen years-!

With his very second appearance in Weird (The Secret in the Tomb), Bloch joined his new friends Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard in writing stories laid against the connected (but invented) background lore-system of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. He went on later, of course, to find more modern settings and themes better suited to his individual personality - he went on, in fact, to become a widely successful author of scripts for radio, television and the movies (and it's one of the ironies of his fine career that he was given the chance to write the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's classic film Psycho - the most successful black-and-white movie ever made - since he wrote the novel on which the scenario was, and very closely based); but it is as a contributor to the Mythos that I must deal with him here.

The Cthulhu Mythos is a heterogeneous collection of short stories, a few novels, poems, sonnet-sequences, and other miscellaneous things, held together by a commonly shared system of information. A mythology, if you will. All right, a demonology, then. The authors who contributed to it - the authors who are still contributing to it, for the Mythos is by no means dead - play the game more  or less according to the rules laid down by Lovecraft, Smith, and Howard, who were the first to get in on the fun. The rules are that each writer should invent a demon-god or two, and a crumbling tome of blasphemous eldritch lore, and as often as not, a milieu - generally a decaying backwater of old towns slouching into desuetude, with an omnipresent aura of ancient witchcraft and obscure Cults in their past...and generally their present, too.

Lovecraft invented Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, and that shuddersome Bible of the Mythos, the unmentionable Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred. Smith invented Ubbo-Sathla, Tsathoggua, and Abhoth, and the legendary Book of Eibon. Howard invented Golgoroth, Koth, and the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt. Derleth invented Hastur, Cthugha, the Celaeno Fragments, and the Comte d'Erlette's Cultes des Goules, Lovecraft set most of his tales, but by no means all, in an imaginary region of coastal Massachusetts; Smith laid his in prehistoric Hyperborea or  Medieval Averoign. And so on; you get the idea. Come to think of it, you probably already know the idea, or you wouldn't have bothered to read this article.

With his second story, The Secret of the Tomb, Bloch made some rather tentative contributions to that library-full of mouldering volumes of forbidden lore, mentioning the Cabala of Saboth, and the Occultus of Hierarchius, and "Prinn". Prinn was the only one he developed to any particular extent, although in subsequent stories he added the Black Rites of mad Luveh-Keraph, priest of "cryptic Bast", and a number of books and tales by imaginary authors such as Simon Maglore and Edgar Henquist Gordon.

It was the Flemish Wizard, Ludvig Prinn, and his hellish book, De Vermis Mysteriis or Mysteries of the Worm, that became and that remains Robert Bloch's major contribution to the lore of the Mythos. In his story The Shambler from the Stars - which, incidentally, he dedicated to Lovecraft - he builds upon Prinn's life and history and reveals as much as he ever wished to pass on to us of the contents and theme of that ghoulish tome. I refer you to the tale in question: the volume certainly belongs to the same dusty shelf with Unaussprechlichen Kulten and the Book of Eibon.

I can no longer refrain from informing you of the hideous truth: Robert Bloch has a sense of humor. Humor and horror have never been so inextricably mixed as in the career of Robert Bloch. If HPL hadn't encouraged him to contribute to Weird Tales, I have no doubt but that he would have gone on to write material for Fred Allen, Sid Caesar or Bob Hope.