THE DEEP ONES: "Black Bargain" by Robert Bloch

"Black Bargain" by Robert Bloch

Discussion begins May 25, 2022.

First published in the May 1942 issue of Weird Tales.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?65051

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Mysteries of the Worm: Earle Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos
Don't Open This Book!
American Supernatural Tales
The Living Demons

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://cthulhufiles.com/stories/bloch/bloch-black-bargain.html

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSeGNv1rl9U

MISCELLANY

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/aboutsf/episodes/2012-06-01T10_30_42-07_00
https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS16513
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bloch
http://blog.loa.org/2010/09/what-robert-bloch-owes-to-h-p-lovecraft.html
https://tinyurl.com/2spjmry9

I read "Black Bargain" a few years ago in American Supernatural Tales (a book I foolishly lent out and will probably never see again).

I've recently been working my way through Mysteries of the Worm: Early Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and have just got to this story.

I did like this story, particularly enjoying the way that the nature of the shadow was left somewhat undefined. Was it the evoked entity or an agent or an effect thereof? The pharmacist narrator seems to have been able to duck any personal ill consequence other than a terrible fright.

It has more of Faust than Cthulhu, but I liked it. It struck me as exhibiting some of the development of the modern weird story that Fritz Leiber's "Smoke Ghost" from a year earlier did. Granted, it still features the older idea of a bargain with supernatural forces, but the setting, a soda shop and a corporate office, are more modern.

Yeah, it definitely has a bit of that "Smoke Ghost" vibe, although I thought Leiber hit a more frightening note on the whole.

I suppose the main difference between this and "Smoke Ghost" is that in Lieber's story the "monster" is for want of a better word, new- both an original idea and ("in universe" in the story) a product of the modern city environment.

In "Black Bargain" although the setting and the tone are modern, the monster is an intrusion from the pre-industrial, pre-Enlightmenment past, to all intends and purposes from a different world. It's like Dracula in 1890s London (in a novel published in 1897), in that respect. The basic idea or trope itself is common to so many ghost stories, Mythos tales and so on.

Tonally though, the story seems to be in the vanguard of mid-20th century American weird fiction that in retrospect has a "Twilght Zone" feel about it.

Finally got around to reading this today. Fairly nice elaboration on the bargain-with-infernal-powers plot, I thought.

I did wonder a bit at the narrator's reading the book. It's not entirely clear to me whether we're to assume it's an English translation or the narrator translates the title for us, but it's said to be written in blackletter - would someone like the narrator be likely to be able to read that with much facility?

>7 AndreasJ:

On the readability of the book...I think forms of black letter were in use mid-20th Century, more than we recall. Didn't the Nazis favour it (was there an older tradition? Did German-American communities use it? I genuinely don't know, just thinking aloud). And it was on mastheads of newspapers like The Times. I suppose we also have to assume the narrator's education included Latin - or it was an element of his qualifying as a pharmacist.

The actual Latin of the book itself, though, might well have been written in a difficult to read and/or unprofessional hand, full of contractions that again would make it difficult to read.

I think on balance I come down on the side of a a degree of poetic licence is being used by Robert Bloch here.

Some Nazis liked blackletter, considering it Germanic, but Hitler didn’t, and abolished it for official use during the war.

To what extent it was used by German-Americans I have no idea.

I think blackletter persisted in German publications in the US a little longer than in Germany. That would be typical of languages brought here, which tend to conserve features that become obsolete in their countries of origin.