Robert Bloch's Atoms and Evil

Atoms and Evil is a collection of short stories by Robert Bloch. The stories were originally published in various pulps between 1948 and 1960.

Robert Bloch (1917-1994) started out as a protégé of H.P. Lovecraft. Bloch had an extraordinary ability to come up with cleverly twisted plots with nasty stings in the tail and to combine them with black comedy.

In these stories he turns his hand to science fiction and the paranormal.

There’s also quite a bit of satire, mostly directed at the 1950s obsession with consumerism.

Try This For Psis is a lighthearted tale of the paranormal. Dr Angus Welk is a crusty scientist who has no patience at all with nonsense like ESP and telekinesis and he has a daughter named Nora. He also has a bitter scientific rival, a Professor Seine, who works in the field of ESP and psionics. Professor Seine has a student named Frank Tallent who is a brilliant psychic sensitive with just about every paranormal power you can name. As luck would have it Nora and Frank fall in love and want to get married. Obviously Dr Welk is likely to oppose the match very bitterly indeed. To make things worse Professor Seine intends to use Frank to prove to Dr Welk that psychic powers are real. That’s certain to provoke a storm.

It’s actually a very amusing story.

Comfort Me, My Robot starts with a man named Henson who is suffering from stress. He goes to see the Adjustor. This is the 22nd century and adjustors are like psychiatrists but with much more effective treatment methods at their disposal. Henson tells the Adjustor that he wants to murder his wife. The Adjustor tells him it’s no problem and that he will make the necessary arrangements. After all murder is recognised as a valuable therapeutic tool.

This is the 22nd century of course and completely human-looking robots are everywhere. This is a delightfully twisted little tale, one of the best in this collection.

Talent is about a foundling. Andrew Benson grows up in an orphanage and develops an extraordinary talent for mimicry. He can copy a person’s every gesture and every characteristic of a person’s speech. He also learns to copy characters he sees at the movies. It’s almost as if he becomes the character. Which goes a long way to explaining certain subsequent events.

The Professor Plays It Square is about a couple of card sharps whose fondest dreams are about to come true when the biggest sucker of all time wanders into the dive where they hang out. Professor Glockenspiel has plenty of money. Bugsy and his pal intend to relieve him of all of it. The way they play poker it’s not a game of chance, it’s a sure thing. Or is it? Another amusing little tale.

Block That Metaphor is another example of Bloch’s dark sense of humour. It concerns a robot from another planet, visiting Earth on a diplomatic mission. Although he’s not quite a robot. He has an organic brain but a mechanical body. His way of thinking is however rather mechanical. He is thoughtful and polite but he takes everything literally. Very literally. With disastrous consequences.

Wheel and Deal is a throwaway humorous tale of a used female dealer - he sells late-model used sexbots.

You Got To Have Brains is about a funny little guy who rents a loft so he can build a spaceship. He has a theory that what you need to power a spaceship is to harness mental energy. You have to have brains to do something like that. It has the typical Bloch humorous/grotesque sting in the tail. Not a bad story.

In You Could Be Wrong Harry Jessup returns from the war, gets a job, marries his sweetheart and everything is fine until one day Harry starts to suspect that everything is fake. Not just the usual things that really are fake, like movies and television. Harry starts to doubt absolutely everything. Maybe nothing at all is real. But where does that leave him? How could he prove it? Another pretty solid story.

Egghead is an attempt at political satire, written in 1955 at the height of the Red Scare. Radical extremists are undermining the country and they’re promoting some wacky and dangerous ideas. These crazies are suggesting that maybe consumerism isn’t the very foundation of civilisation and some of them even want people to be able to study subversive subjects like English Literature. It’s an amusing enough story.

Dead-End Doctor is about Dr Howard Anson, the last psychiatrist on Earth. This is a world in which nobody is crazy any more so psychiatrists aren’t needed. He has never had a patient. It’s also a world in which robots have replaced humans in most jobs. Dr Howard Anson faces a grim future but fate is about to step in and give him hope. An amusing story.

Change of Heart is a very creepy little tale about a brilliant watchmaker who can fix any watch. One of the best stories in the collection with a punch-in-the-guts ending.

Edifice Complex has a rather nasty punchline as well. Wayne and Nora (a girl he picked up in a bar in a space-port) land their spaceship on the planet Vergis IV. Wayne wanted to go there because there are diamonds there, lots of them, and he knows how to get them. The sozzled old miner Luke told him all about it before dying. All they have to do is find the hut Luke described to him. Not a bad story.

Constant Reader is more overtly science fictional. A routine reconnaissance mission to the planet 68/5 finds no life, but they do find intelligence. Or rather it finds them. One member of the crew has a strange hobby. He reads books. Which could turn out to be disastrous. A clever and ambitious story.

It’s a very uneven collection with some stories being essentially just extended jokes while others are intelligent sophisticated (if rather dark) tales with very satisfying payoffs. Some of the stories are very much of the 1950s while others are uncomfortably relevant today. Bloch’s morbid sense of humour shines through. Atoms and Evil is recommended if you like your science fiction offbeat.

G-8 and his Battle Aces #1 The Bat Staffel

Robert J. Hogan (1897–1963) was an American pulp writer, best known for his aviation adventure stories. He wrote the Red Falcon and Smoke Wade stories for Popular Publications and from 1933 wrote 110 issues of the G-8 and his Battle Aces pulp magazine, each issue including a short novel. Hogan had trailed as a pilot during the First World War so wartime aviation stories were obvious subject matter for him. He also wrote seven Mysterious Wu Fang Yellow Peril pulp novels and later turned to westerns.

The Bat Staffel was the first of the G-8 and his Battle Aces novels. The hero is an American aviator and spy code-named G-8. There’s plenty of air combat (with G-8 almost single-handedly winning the air war) but there are some mild science fiction elements and hints of the occult and the supernatural although Hogan’s novel is not as outrageous (or as imaginative) as Donald Keyhoe’s roughly contemporary stories about Captain Philip Strange, the Brain-Devil.

There’s an evil German mad scientist, Herr Doctor Kreuger, who has come across mediæval legends of giant bats spreading death and destruction across the countryside with their poisonous bat breath. He decides that those giant bats will fly again, devastating France and allowing Germany to win the war. G-8’s job is to discover whether these giant bats are actual bats or ingenious machines, and to find a way to stop them.

G-8 gets some help from two heroic American flyers, Nippy Weston and Bull Martin. This gives G-8 the opportunity to explain crucial plot points to his side-kicks. In the process they shoot down most of the Imperial German Air Force. What chance do fifty Fokkers have against three Americans in their trusty Spads?

Hogan resorts to quite a few standard pulp plot devices. The chief villain, instead of doing the sensible thing and just shooting G-8 out of hand as a spy, carefully explains all the details of his master plan to him first and then of course G-8 escapes. Pulp villains just never learn not to do that. And the Germans just don’t seem to be able to tie up prisoners in such a way that they cannot escape. Of course it goes without saying that the Germans are all lousy shots, whether in the air or on the ground while G-8 and his buddies rarely miss. The Germans are all either evil or they’re fools. But of course this is what the pulp readership expected and wanted. Hogan understand his market.

The bats and their poison bat breath are a nicely sinister touch. The bats are almost impossible to destroy which makes them a suitably terrifying menace.

Hogan certainly knew how to pace a pulp story. This one hits the ground running and the action don’t let up. There are no romantic sub-plots to distract from the action (the readership of such tales was not going to want any soppy romance stuff). There’s no characterisation to speak of. G-8 is a square-jawed all-American action hero. The villain  is pure evil and degeneracy personified.

There are some plot holes but it’s pulp fiction and it’s fast-moving and the readers were unlikely to notice such details.

It might seem like I’m damning The Bat Staffel with faint praise but it’s actually pretty good fun. This is pulp fiction that is very very pulpy. As First World War aviation adventures go it’s not as good as Donald Keyhoe’s Strange War or The Vanished Legion but it’s still quite enjoyable and if you like air combat stories with a few hints of science fiction and weird fiction then I’d recommend it.

Adventure House have republished The Bat Staffel as well as quite a few of the other G-8 and his Battle Aces novels. Their edition also includes a short story by R. Sidney Bowen, The Floating Runt (which has been included in the original pulp magazine as well). It’s a rather contrived story about the rivalry between a pilot and a balloon observer. It's not great but since it's essentially a free added extra it would be churlish to complain too much.

The Secrets of Dr Taverner

Violet Mary Firth (1890-1946) was a British occultist who wrote under the name Dion Fortune. She wrote both fiction and non-fiction. Her fiction includes a collection of short stories, The Secrets of Dr Taverner, about an occult detective and healer. It was published in 1926.

Fortune’s work blends the occult with psychoanalysis and this is the approach favoured by her fictional counterpart Dr Taverner. While these stories are fiction the author claimed that they were all based on fact, and as outlandish as it might seem there is little doubt that she believed this to be true. Whatever one may think of Fortune’s beliefs they did inspire her to write some interesting fiction and The Secrets of Dr Taverner will be of interest to fans of the occult detective genre.

The over-arching theme of these stories is that there is another realm of existence, the Unseen. It is in some ways analogous to the world of faerie, or to an earlier pagan phase of human existence that still lurks under the surface of 20th century life. There is another aspect of the Unseen world - Dr Taverner serves forces that are beyond ordinary human understanding. The concept of secret supernatural entities or “hidden chiefs” to whom occult societies were bound was common in many of the esoteric magical societies that flourished in late Victorian and Edwardian times. Dion Fortune belonged to several of these magical societies and not surprisingly this fact was a major influence on her fiction. 

The first story, Blood-Lust, takes a very original approach indeed to the vampire legend. It’s a variation on the theme of the vampire that feeds on life energies but the way the vampire is created is the really original part. Of all the stories collected here this is the one that is closest to being a true, and very effective, horror story.

The Return of the Ritual deals with the theft of a centuries-old manuscript containing instructions for carrying out an occult ritual.

The Man Who Sought tells of a young man, an aviator and motoring enthusiast, a man obsessed with speed. He always seems to be in a hurry, as if he is searching for something. That’s exactly what he is doing. He is searching for his ideal woman, hence his obsession with speed - she could be anywhere and he has to find her.

The Soul That Would Not Be Born sees the author indulging in her obsession with reincarnation. Reincarnation is a remarkably silly concept but it has to be admitted that it has its literary uses and has formed the basis for some interesting fiction. In this case a reluctant soul must pay the price for sins committed in a past life.

In The Scented Poppies a series of suicides has taken place among the prospective heirs to a large fortune. But were they really suicides? Or murders committed by very unusual occult means? This is one of the most successful stories in the collection.

In The Death Hound a man with a weak heart is tormented by visions of a savage dog attacking him. He is the victim of an occult attack, by means of thought transference, by a man who is his rival for a woman. Thought transference figures in many of these stories, and it’s central in this one. This is also one of a number of stories in which we encounter the shadowy menace of the Black Lodges, mysterious occult societies practising black magic. Dion Fortune took this sort of thing very seriously, claiming to be herself a victim of magical attacks. This is another rather effective story.

A Daughter of Pan is one of the weaker stories, concerning itself fairly predictably with mystical silliness. The Subletting of the Mansion is much more interesting. It’s a very unconventional romantic triangle story with one party attempting to succeed in the romantic rivalry by means of stealing his rival’s body.

Recalled is the weakest tale in the collection, a tedious tale of colonial guilt and the reconciling of east and west. 

The Sea Lure is a mystical love story dealing with elementals. The content is rather silly but it includes some interesting speculations about hysterical stigmata. It’s one of the stories in the collection in which dreams play a large part.

The Power House is another tale of the misuse of magical powers, a theme that recurs in several of these stories. A Son of the Night tells of an earl whose family wishes to have him certified as insane, although Dr Taverner can see that he is simply not quite human. This idea of people who are slightly non-human, who might in earlier times have been considered of elven stock or perhaps denizens of the realm of faerie, recurs in several of these tales.

A very mixed bag overall, and some readers are likely to be put off by a certain irritating preachiness. Fortune takes the occult very very seriously. This is not necessarily a disadvantage when it comes to writing occult fiction but many of these stories are too obviously attempts to persuade us of the author’s mystical beliefs. At the same time several of the stories do work quite well as unconventional supernatural and/or paranormal tales. I’m not sure I’d recommend this collection as a purchase but if you can find a library copy it might perhaps be worth a look. 

I should emphasise that I am judging this collection as occult fiction, while the author undoubtedly intended it to be more in the nature of propaganda for her mystical beliefs.

The Vanished Legion

Donald E. Keyhoe became quite well-known in the 1950s and 1960s as a UFO researcher. In the 1930s he’d been a prolific contributor to pulp magazines and it’s clear that the former Marine Corps pilot’s interest in the weird was already very well established. The seven stories in The Vanished Legion were published in Dare-Devil Aces magazine from 1932 to 1934.

The Vanished Legion is a top-secret squadron of American airmen on the Western Front in the First World War. The first story, The Squadron of Forgotten Men, establishes the backstory.

These men are all officially dead. They had been fighter pilots engaged in espionage work and had been captured and tortured and horribly disfigured by an insane German master-spy. They had later escaped. A brilliant French surgeon repaired the damage to their faces, but he could not reproduce their original features exactly. Their faces are now unmarred, but they’re not the same faces. The fact that they were all listed as officially dead and the further fact that they are now unrecognisable combine to make them uniquely valuable as spies and counter-spies. All speak German fluently.

They are based in a top-secret hidden base located in a cavern in the Vosges Mountains. They are equipped with captured German aircraft and supplied with German uniforms for missions behind enemy lines. Their leader is Captain Dick Traine, a typical square-jawed pulp hero.

These are not just stories of aviation and espionage. There’s plenty of aerial action and plenty of standard pulp two-fisted hijinks but there are also very generous helpings of the weird, the horrific and the science fictional.

The “Vanished Legion” come up against a variety of brilliant but sinister enemies. Their enemies are always German master-spies or intelligence officers but they bear a much closer resemblance to the diabolical criminal masterminds and mad scientists who always featured prominently in the pulps.

These enemies come up with an extraordinary array of fiendish plots to destroy the air forces and armies of the Allies and win the war quickly for Germany. Their schemes include gigantic bombers, death rays, invisible aircraft, submarine aircraft carriers, super-fast fighter aircraft capable of speeds far beyond anything envisaged during the First World War, robot aircraft, even midget pilots flying midget fighter planes!

As you might expect from an author who later interested himself in UFOs Keyhoe always tries to give some vaguely plausible scientific (or at least pseudoscientific) basis to these plots. You won’t come across any real ghosts or monsters in these stories. You will come across things that might appear supernatural (such as sinister disembodied voices prophesying death and disaster) but they always turn out to be some kind of ingenious technological contrivance. The invisible aircraft for example are coated with special paint to make them virtually impossible to see in normal light - they’re basically 1918-vintage Stealth Fighters.

Keyhoe isn’t overly concerned to make these ideas plausible. As long as the ideas are bizarre and fantastic and can be given a pseudoscientific gloss with technobabble he’s quite content. Given that he had considerable success in the pulps it’s obvious that his readers were quite content as well. And his technobabble is certainly entertaining technobabble.

The stories themselves rely on disguises, narrow escapes, lots of gunplay and fisticuffs and plenty of suitable pulp hero-type dialogue. Dick Traine and his comrades are totally two-dimensional brave, noble and super-tough heroes but this is pulp fiction and no-one wants complex tortured heroes in stories like these. The villains are ruthless, brilliant, utterly evil and completely unhinged. They are fiendishly clever but prone to making the sorts of dumb mistakes that will allow the heroes always to get the better of them in the end.

If you have any tendencies towards aviation geekdom and you enjoy science fiction and pulp fiction then Keyhoe’s stories should satisfy all your cravings. Even if you’re not an aviation geek you should still enjoy them - he doesn’t get too involved in complex technical  details of aerial fighting (although if such things do excite you he does appear to know his stuff).

There are several other collections of Keyhoe’s available, all covering the same type of subject matter. Strange War recounts some of the adventures of stage magician and hypnotist-turned fighter pilot and spy Captain Philip Strange, and they’re great fun as well.

The Vanished Legion is fine pulp entertainment. Recommended.

The Ka of Gifford Hillary

Dennis Wheatley’s The Ka of Gifford Hillary, published in 1956, is one of the “black magic” novels for which he was most famous although in fact the majority of his very large literary output consisted of non-occult thrillers. While there is no black magic as such in this book there are certainly supernatural, or at least paranormal, forces at work here.

Sir Gifford Hillary is the chairman of a large shipbuilding firm. He is asked by the Minister for Defence to undertake on an unofficial task. The Minister is convinced that the security of the United Kingdom can only be assured by a complete reliance on nuclear weapons and to fund the building of such weapons economies will need to be made in other areas of defence spending. For one thing, the Royal Navy will need to be abolished. Hillary’s job will be to help in creating a political climate favourable to such a drastic change.

Sir Gifford has other problems closer to home. His beautiful wife Ankaret has had many affairs. Sir Gifford has learnt to deal philosophically with the situation. Ankaret is a passionate woman whose physical needs are considerable but she loves her husband and he tolerates her infidelities. But now Ankaret has created a very awkward situation. Sir Gifford has a scientist named Owen Evans living in his house, a scientist who works for his shipbuilding company but also pursues his own pet personal projects, which at the moment consists mostly of working on a death ray. Ankaret has no intention of sleeping with the scientist but she has been flirting with him rather outrageously and now he has become obsessed by her. So obsessed that he has determined to murder Sir Gifford. Which he does. And Sir Gifford has the unsettling experience of watching his own murder.

Gifford Hillary is dead, but to his surprise he is still very much around. He assumes that this strangely ghostly existence means that he is in fact a ghost but the truth is much stranger than that. It appears that the ancient Egyptians were right - a person has not just a soul but several distinct spiritual essences, one of which is the ka. And now Sir Gifford’s ka has become not just a spectator at his own murder but will be the observer of many other disturbing events.

He will watch his wife murder the lustful scientist and then calmly forge a letter in his own handwriting placing the blame on Sir Gifford. Sir Gifford is not angry at her for this. After all he’s dead so she’s not doing him any harm and he rather admires her presence of mind in coming up with such a clever way of evading the law.

Hillary will also become a witness to a communist plot to assassinate the Defence Minister and a series of misadventures (partly his fault) that threaten to ruin the career of his nephew. He has two children of his own by his first marriage (Ankaret was his second wife and was much younger than her husband) but frankly they don’t like him and he doesn’t like them. His nephew has become more like a real son to him.

Hillary can see these events happening but he cannot intervene or make contact with anyone. But somehow he has to foil the communist plot and save his nephew’s career. And perhaps there is a way he can influence events. He has an idea of how this can be done but it will prove to be an exceptionally difficult task. Being dead is rather a big disadvantage but Hillary is resourceful and he isn’t giving up. The results of his efforts will lead him to a shocking discovery about his own death.

It all sounds very silly, and it is, but that was never a problem for Wheatley. He was no great literary stylist, his books suffer from certain characteristic structural faults and his characterisation was pretty sketchy but there was no doubt of his ability to come up with bizarrely fascinating plots that worked in spite of their outlandishness. And there was certainly no doubt of his ability to tell an enthralling story.

One of the characteristic faults of Wheatley’s writing was his propensity for indulging in lengthy digressions on the subjects of his favourite political hobbyhorses. Wheatley’s political views are unfashionable today but he gave a great deal of thought to politics and was often unnervingly prescient. His political conspiracy theories were elaborate and ingenious and enormous fun. He was never afraid of pushing his conspiracy theories too far - he pushed them as far as he possibly could.

The book starts a little slowly - Wheatley was never in a hurry - but once the plot really gets going the tension becomes truly nail-biting. Quite apart from the annoyance of being dead everything seems to conspire against Gifford Hillary. Hillary however is not a man to allow death to stop him from doing what he has to do.

There’s actually considerably more to Hillary’s death and his subsequent ghostly existence  than meets the eye but I don’t intend to spoil what is definitely one of Wheatley’s cleverest plots.

It’s both a political thriller and a supernatural thriller. While Wheatley did not write horror as such, his Black Magic books being more accurately described as occult thrillers, there are certainly some effective and very macabre horror moments in this one.

Wheatley is always good trashy fun, with plenty of excitement and a dash of sex, and The Ka of Gifford Hillary is immensely entertaining. Highly recommended.

Donald E. Keyhoe's Strange War

Donald E. Keyhoe (1897-1988) was an ex-Marine Corps pilot who turned to writing for the pulps in the 1920s. His stories were aviation adventure tales but with a very large dash of weird fiction. Strange War is a collection of six of the sixty-four stories he wrote about Captain Philip Strange, the Brain-Devil. Keyhoe later became a UFO freak.

Philip Strange had been a carnival performer doing a mental act involving hypnotism, and had studied various eastern esoteric philosophies. When the First World War broke he was assigned to G-2, the US Army Air Corps’ intelligence section. He was a fighter ace and a spy-hunter and helped to foil various outlandish German schemes to spread terror and confusion.

The stories combine aerial combat and espionage with elements of the bizarre. In Scourge of the Skies a diabolically clever German scientist has developed a gigantic mechanical pterodactyl. Other stories involve death rays and beams of light that cause instant senility, or what appear to be ultra-advanced super high speed aircraft.

The Western Front is stalked by monsters and by strange irrational fears.

Interestingly enough these uncanny threats are all given reasonably rational explanations - very unlikely explanations but non-supernatural. There’s some delightful technobabble here.

Strange is a master of disguise as well as being well-versed in all kinds of mental feats and possessing skills that approach the paranormal.

The stories are wonderfully offbeat and the style is pulpy and breathless. There are various malevolent figures working for the German Empire who seem to be inspired by fictional diabolical criminal masterminds such as Dr Fu Manchu. In fact the tone is a bit like Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories but with more technology and more science, albeit weird fringe science. A cross between the Fu Manchu books and Buck Rogers.

The stories were originally published in a pulp magazine called Flying Aces.

Highly recommended for its delirious mixture of aerial combat, hypnotism, stage magic, spies, fiendish inventions and the paranormal.