The Devil with You

Best known for his movie-spawning novel Psycho, Bloch was a prolific writer whose career spanned seven decades. This compilation of four early novellas is not, however, so much a preservation of literary greatness as it is a pleasurable plunge into the last days of the pulp era. As Schow explains in his introduction, ""This material is not supposed to be classic literature... yet, in a way, it is, because it easily accomplishes one of the criteria: It presents an honest snapshot of its time."" Bloch's proclivity for puns and general slapstick runs at full tilt in ""The Devil with You!"" (1950), in which inebriated magicians romp through a thin plot set in a hotel replete with supernatural goings-on. Liquor fuels the characters of ""The Big Binge"" (1955) as well; coach Buster Gutz, psychiatrist Perry Noid and his niece Ada propel a plot that involves skewed psychotherapy, a machine called ""The Psychopathfinder,"" Communist spies, nude women and vampires. Both novellas showcase Bloch's comic side, where the scary is delightfully subsumed by the silly. Bloch's horrific tale of alien invasion, ""Strictly from Mars"" (1948), also features a wise-cracking, hard-drinking hero, but its humor is edged with enough serious paranoia to make one see why it was effectively chilling in its day. The oldest story in the collection, ""It Happened Tomorrow"" (1943), is a sober, detailed take on a doomsday machines-take-over-the-world scenario. The first in a series of volumes on rarely reprinted Blochnalia, this collection by no means represents the best of the author's work, but it does capture the variety of his style and thus adds immeasurably to an overall appreciation of Bloch's influence on fantasy and modern horror. (May)