In literature I have walked the midnight paths with Poe or crept amidst the shadows withMachen; combed the realms of horrific stars with Baudelaire, or steeped myself with earth’s inner madness amidst the tales of ancient lore.

Welcome to Dweller of the Dark. We are a channel honoring the yellowed and blackened bones of many prominent authors. We will be digging up several obscure, strange, and forgotten authors who influenced many of the great horror, science fiction, and fantasy writer’s today. Comment below if you like. If you have authors that you’d like to see recognized list them in the comments or contact our author page.

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Tonight, we introduce the great Robert Albert Bloch. He was a fiction writer with a diverse array of stories in crime, horror, fantasy and science fiction. Bloch is best known as the writer of “Psycho” that led to Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, many great tales on Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery”, and the Hammer horror film classic, “The House That Dripped Blood”. Robert Bloch’s fondness for humor in horror was evident in puns. This was evident in the titles of his story collections such as “Tales in a Jugular Vein”, “Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of” and “Out of the Mouths of Graves”.

Then there’s the classic Bloch favorite line, “I have the heart of a child. I keep it in a jar on my shelf.”

There are hundreds of Bloch short stories and over 30 novels. Robert Bloch was one of the youngest members of the Lovecraft Circle. His professional writing career began immediately after high school graduation at age 17. He was a protege of H. P. Lovecraft who was the first to seriously encourage his talent.

Robert Bloch won numerous awards in writing.  He won The Hugo Award (“That Hell-Bound Train”), The Bram Stoker Award, and The World Fantasy Award. Bloch served a term as president of The Mystery Writers of America (1970). He was a member of The Mystery Writers of America, Science Fiction Writers of America, The Writers Guild of America, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and The Count Dracula Society.

The Shambler from the Stars a short story written by Robert Bloch a writer part of H.P. Lovecraft’s inner circle. The story was first published in the September 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Later the tale was added to the book “The Opener of the Way” in 1945 and his 1994 collection “The Early Fears”. Further “The Shambler from the Stars” is considered part of the Cthulhu Mythos and introduced the fictional forbidden tome De Vermis Mysteriis (Mysteries of the Worm). H.P. Lovecraft in 1935, wrote the terrifying “The Haunter of the Dark” as a sequel to “The Shambler from the Stars” and dedicated it to Bloch. Eventually, in 1950, Robert wrote his own sequel “The Shadow from the Steeple”.

The “Shambler from the Stars” centers on a nameless college student narrator who hopes to make a living a famous writer of weird fiction. The narrator early writing efforts are painfully inadequate. Rejection after rejection by magazine editors causes the narrator to yearn after the forbidden knowledge. The narrator seeks out those who are true practitioners of the occult. Sending letters of correspondence to free thinkers, and academics from all over the country allows the narrator to meet a likeminded “mystic dreamer” from Providence, New England. Together they dive into searching further for the mysterious occult book De Vermis Mysteriis.

Will the narrator and the “mystic dreamer” find this mysterious book? Once found, what evil and horrors will they unleash conjuring with “De Vermis Mysteriis”?