Who Goes There?

Robert Bloch was something of a prodigy, with his first stories being published professionally when he was still in high school. He was also probably the youngest member of the Lovecraft circle, being correspondents with the man himself in the last few years of the latter’s life, and they were on such good terms that they even dedicated stories to each other. Bloch’s early work very much owed a debt to Lovecraft, but by the early ’40s he had matured into a different kind of horror writer, although mostly he still wrote in the supernatural mode for the rest of his career. This may come as a bit of a surprise to people who only know about Bloch through Psycho, which is horror but not supernatural, although the Bates house is certainly haunted in a metaphorical if not literal sense. Of course, we should not feel too bad for Bloch being known nowadays mostly for a single novel that’s also somewhat uncharacteristic of his oeuvre, since he made some big bucks out of it, and he also wrote for TV on top of his prose fiction, most famously a few spooky-themed Star Trek episodes.

Horror was Bloch’s genre of choice, without question, although he did write SF on occasion, and funnily enough the last Bloch story I reviewed here, “The Movie People,” is fantasy but decidedly not horror. If “The Movie People” was Bloch attempting a sentimental fantasy sort of in the style of Ray Bradbury, then “The Hungry House” sees Bloch on his home turf, and is all the better for it. This is a classic haunted-house story with a morbid ending, which also feels distinctly modern in the sense that it feels like it could’ve only been written no earlier than the 20th century. The haunted-house story has a long lineage, going way back to the days of the original Gothic novel in the late 18th century, and Bloch does just enough here to distinguish his story from its many predecessors.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1951 issue of Imagination. It’s been reprinted a fair number of times, including Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural (ed. Marvin and Saralee Kaye), The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and the Bloch collections Pleasant Dreams—Nightmares, The Best of Robert Bloch, and The Early Fears (Bloch really loved his wordplay).

Enhancing Image

Bloch does something clever from the outset in that he lets us know, in not so plain words, that this is meant to be taken as an allegory, since the protagonists, a married couple, are not given names, simply being referred to as “he” and “she.” The couple had bought a five-year lease on this house, which I’m not sure if this is a thing or not nowadays, since I’m not a homeowner (at least at this time) myself. Normally such a story would start with the couple moving in and discovering, gradually, that something is a bit off about their new home, but we start with the duo already being aware that they have a problem before briefly flashing back to when the trouble started. This is a nice way of getting us quickly up to speed on what kind of story this is, as Bloch seems to know that the reader is probably already familiar with haunted-house narratives; even in 1951 they were kind of old-hat. We also waste no time in being told why the couple can’t just move out, which is always the question one asks with this kind of story. “Why don’t they just leave?” And sell the house to whom? And how do they explain the issue to anyone, even their agent, whom we find out has a secret or two of his own. There’s a degree of self-awareness here that’s both indicative of when “The Hungry House” was written and of how deeply Bloch is familiar with his game. He knows, just as we know, what we’re in for; the question the remains as to the exact execution of it.

He and she’s marriage is tested from the outside, by the fact that their house, or more specifically the mirrors in their house, is haunted. At different points they see a man, a young girl, and an old woman in the reflections of these windows (a window is a kind of mirror, after all) and mirrors. They know something is wrong and yet feel powerless before this ghostly power, doubly so because there’s gonna be a house-warming party that weekend and it’s not like they can make up a good-enough excuse for the guests. Their friends will be coming over, among them being Mr. Hacker, the agent who sold them the house in the first place. (I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a joke that his name is Hacker, being that he sold the house on a lie by way of omission.) The ensuing party sequence, in which we’re introduced to a bunch of well-dressed urbanites, reads like it could belong in literary fiction of the time, or SF that was being printed in Galaxy. This is a story about people who think rather highly of themselves, and are prone to follies we tend to associate with the upper-middle class, namely vanity and a pervasive itch to escape boredom. Bloch explicitly mentions the myth of Narcissus more than once, although an unspoken influence is no doubt The Picture of Dorian Gray, especially once we hear about the house’s backstory. A basic flaw with “The Hungry House,” which sadly is a weak spot with Bloch’s writing generally, is that it leans into misogyny, to the point where the misogynistic element is part of the story’s DNA. We even get the “Woman, thy name is vanity!” line, so that while people of either gender are susceptible to it in-story, Bloch also makes it out to be a decidedly feminine flaw.

As is similarly the case with Psycho, all this trouble started because of a bitchy old woman. This house used to belong to the Bells, with Joe Bell building it back in “the sixties” (I have to think the 1860s), with his wife dying in childbirth and him being left to care for his daughter Laura. Laura grows up to be a wealthy spinster who stays young for decades, or at least appears to stay young, with the help of the mirrors in the house. She becomes so obsessed with her own beauty that she locks herself away from even her servants to focus on herself. However, when one of the servants breaks a mirror (dying in the process, although Laura doesn’t mind that part so much), the magic breaks as well, with Laura seeing herself as a horribly aged woman. (See what I mean by the Dorian Gray influence?) In despair she commits suicide, cutting her throat on the broken glass. The woman may have died in body, but apparently not in spirit, since she continues to be mistress of the manor years after her death. A few people, including a little girl who had gone missing, have met bad ends coming to this house. There’s some ambiguity as to how much the house has direct control over the people inside it and how much of it is merely illusion—you might say a trick of the light, thanks to the haunted reflections. The reflections are haunted, that much is certain, but Bloch (I think wisely) leaves it up to interpretation as to how much control Laura has over the house’s architecture. Granted that I don’t think it’s a very scary story, there’s enough cleverness and escalation of tension here to suffice.

There Be Spoilers Here

Hacker and the other party guests leave shaken but otherwise unscathed, but “he” and “she” are not so lucky. Part of me was hoping we would get a happy or even bittersweet ending, but I suppose it had to end this way. To give Our Heroes™ some credit, they make the bright decision that breaking all the mirrors in the house would at least nerf Laura’s power, although (of course) it turns out they had forgotten about one important thing: you can find your reflection in more than just mirrors and windows. Laura’s power lurks in any reflection, including water, and even a pool of fresh blood. It’s predictable, especially for Bloch, who has a soft spot for this kind of morbid conclusion, but I do like how the water pipe bursting could be taken as either a freak accident that just so happens to benefit Laura or something she willed to happen. There’s a raw paranoia here that heightens the story’s scare factor, even if structurally it’s easy enough to figure out in advance, because the villain can work through damn near anything and nothing that can reflect one’s face is to be trusted.

A Step Farther Out

I’ll be honest, when I heard of “The Hungry House” I thought it’d be about a house that literally eats people, but thankfully this turned out not to be the case. Oh sure, the house consumes people, in a kind of metaphorical sense, but it’s more of an old-school haunted-house narrative with that trademark touch of modern self-awareness that Bloch is known for. It may read as a bit creaky and predictable today, but this would not have been so much the case back in 1951. What I can’t help but think about is that Bloch, who remained a regular at Weird Tales until its demise (well, its first demise) in 1953, could not get “The Hungry House” published there, but instead went to the ostensibly SF-focused Imagination, which may or may not have paid as well. I wonder why that happened.

See you next time.