THE DEEP ONES: "The Brood of Bubastis" by Robert Bloch

"The Brood of Bubastis" by Robert Bloch

Discussion begins July 28, 2021.

First published in the March 1934 issue of Weird Tales.



ONLINE VERSIONS

No online versions found to date.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?63768

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Fear and Trembling
Mysteries of the Worm

MISCELLANY

http://darkworldsquarterly.gwthomas.org/the-early-robert-bloch/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Vermis_Mysteriis
https://dwellerofthedark.com/2020/12/12/robert-blochs-egyptian-tales-episode-3-t...
https://lovecraftzine.com/2014/10/14/the-egyptian-tales-of-robert-bloch-by-rober...
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0088645/
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/b/robert-bloch/
https://tinyurl.com/39nuv2pr

Just read this from Mysteries of the Worm, and noted a printing error I hadn’t spotted before: at the top of each recto the name of the present story is repeated in ALL CAPS, except that for several stories, including this one, following “The Opener of the Way” it still says THE OPENER OF THE WAY.

I fear this isn’t one of those misprints that makes a book rare and valuable …

1934 should be 1937, acc’d isfdb and the first misc. link.

A word of warning. I just got out my copy of Mysteries of the Worm from Zebra Press -- the edition linked. The story is not in there so you want the Chaosium anthology.

>4 RandyStafford:

Darn! I like that Zebra edition. Switched the link to what is presumably the proper Chaosium one.

Had Bloch added a couple exclamations of Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! and invented a theonym with a couple apostrophes in rather than using a “real” Egyptian goddess, this would have been a quite stereotypical Mythos tale.

(Is this story why Bast is sometimes treated as a Mythos deity by later writers? Despite HPL’s love of cats and interest in Egypt, I can’t recall him invoking her anywhere?)

I thought the Cornwall setting a bit of an odd choice - why not somewhere closer to Egypt? It’s not like much is made of local colour anyway.

One of the miscellany links reports that Robert Bloch was taken to task, in the letters pages of Weird Tales, for "getting Cornwall wrong" - it doesn't have mountains and wild forest glens. As far as I know (I've only been as far as Devon) it's mostly flat but (being a peninsula) does have a lot of precipitous coastline. I presume he just assumed it would be a clichéd "Celtic" environment. Just as well he didn't try to make too much of the local colour after the story's opening.

The reasons for having the Egyptian priests was twofold, I would guess. The idea probably comes from the theory that the Phoenicians went to Cornwall for its tin, perhaps even settled there. This idea has been pretty much debunked I think but tin was certainly mined in Cornwall and traded across the ancient world in Classical times.

Secondly, it sets up the rogue priests as a kind of parallel to the Cthulhu cult - spread across the world, clandestine, possessed of occult knowledge and powers, and evil.

The hardest thing to swallow in the story is the idea that "the priests had mated animals with humans" and this would result in hybrids with humanoid bodies but animal heads like the representations of the Egyptian deities, or even a human with a snake sticking out of their forehead like the design on an Egyptian crown. I suppose you could try to rationalise it as magic or Dr Moreau-style vivisection, or even an anticipation of gene-splicing, but it's not what the story says.

But Bloch was- what, only 19 or 20 when he wrote this, still learning his craft (and for my money, still a more assured and entertaining effort than the stories in The Early Asimov. And Asimov didn't sell his first story until he was 20).

I meant to mention the biological absurdity of producing such creatures by crossbreeding, but forgot. It must have seemed silly even in the 1930s.