THE DEEP ONES: "Spawn of the Dark One" by Robert Bloch

"Spawn of the Dark One" by Robert Bloch.

Discussion begins May 22, 2024.

First published the May 1958 issue of Fantastic magazine.

Alternate title: "Sweet Sixteen".



BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?65045

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Devil Worshipers
The Satanists
The Early Fears

ONLINE VERSIONS

No online versions found to date.

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

No online audio versions found to date.

MISCELLANY

https://www.robertbloch.net/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bloch
https://ravenousmonster.com/featured-article/psychomania-retrospective/
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0088645/
https://tinyurl.com/yjnxb2p4

Got it:

>2 paradoxosalpha:

I love that cover!

1958 seems precocious for this story, which I placed in the '60s as I was reading it (out of a book published in 1972 with a 1969 copyright). Which "riots" were being referenced I wonder? It seemed like a hybrid of folk horror with the fear-of-youth-culture in Kubrick's Clockwork Orange.

The dual-anthropologist setup wasn't just a device for expository dialogue, since Hibbard was presumably the "blackened dummy" at the end of the tale. As a fifty-something with a college-age daughter, I feel like I should be able to relate to the get-off-my-lawn Hibbard, but I don't much.

There's a nostalgia in reading about the mid-20th-century academic doing his research via newspaper clippings. Today, he would use the internet, and all the conspiracy theorizing would come ready-made for him, with enough epistemic closure to make it both unbelievable and indubitable.