If you missed the last one…
This post is brought to you by “The Box”, a Book Collector story appearing at Anotherealm this month. Like “Big Man” that appeared last November, this is a new story not gathered in The Book of the Black Sun II: The Book Collector. “The Box” has the notoriety of being, chronologically, the first Book Collector tale. The whole thing started by playing Call of Cthulhu in the 1980s. I always played a Private Investigator. Add in Dashiell Hammett’s The Continental Op and there you go. The clock is ticking…
The next monster I want to look at here wasn’t a creation of H. P. Lovecraft but his young protege, Robert Bloch. Wanting his own killer book, Bloch created De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludvig Prinn to sit on the occult shelf next to The Necronomicon and The Pnakotic Manuscript. He did this in a story called “The Shambler From the Stars” (Weird Tales, September 1935). In doing so, Bloch also wanted to have the fun of killing Lovecraft off, something Frank Belknap Long had done in “The Space Eaters” (Weird Tales, July 1928). HPL would return the favor in “The Haunter of the Dark” (Weird Tales, December 1936).
While this was a fun game the Lovecraft Circle enjoyed, “The Shamble From the Stars” also gave us a new monster to go with a scenario that would become a Mythos cliche, the book that summons an unwanted fiend. The plot of “Shambler” is pretty simple. Bloch, writing about himself in a thinly veiled personae, is a Horror writer who becomes intrigued by the true occult. He searches for a real volume of magic in bookshops and jumble sales until he locates a copy of De Vermis Mysteriis. The book is written in Latin, so he takes it to his old friend (a thinly disguised HPL) who can translate the language. His friend unwisely reads an incantation aloud and summons an invisible monster.
“Tibi Magnum Innominandum, signa stellarum nigrarum et bufaniformis Sadoquae sigillum . . .” (“To you the Great Name, the signs of the black stars and the toad-shaped seal of Sadoqua . . .” according to Google Translate.)
The invisible monster approaches the house, giggling, ruining the window frame:
For that unwitting summons was answered. Scarcely had my companion’s voice died away in that little room before the terror came. The room turned cold. A sudden wind shrieked in through the open window; a wind that was not of earth. It bore an evil bleating from afar, and at the sound, my friend’s face became a pale white mask of newly awakened fear. Then there was a crunching at the walls, and the windowledge buckled before my staring eyes. From out of the nothingness beyond that opening came a sudden burst of lubricious laughter—a hysterical cackling born of utter madness. It rose to the grinning quintessence of all horror, without mouth to give it birth.
The shambler picks him up, cracks his back and drains every drop of blood from him.
My friend was shrieking now; his screams blended with that gleeful, atrocious laughter from the empty air. His sagging body, dangling in space, bent backward once again as blood spurted from the torn neck, spraying like a ruby fountain.
That blood never reached the floor. It stopped in midair as the laughter ceased, and a loathsome sucking noise took its place. With a new and accelerated horror, I realized that the blood was being drained to feed the invisible entity from beyond! What creature of space had been so suddenly and unwittingly invoked? What was that vampiric monstrosity I could not see?
Even now a hideous metamorphosis was taking place. The body of my companion became shrunken, wizened, lifeless. At length it dropped to the floor and lay nauseatingly still. But in midair another and a ghastlier change occurred.
A reddish glow filled the corner by the window a bloody glow. Slowly but surely the dim outlines of a Presence came into view; the blood-filled outlines of that unseen shambler from the stars. It was red and dripping; an immensity of pulsing, moving jelly; a scarlet blob with myriad tentacular trunks that waved and waved. There were suckers on the tips of the appendages, and these were opening and closing with ghoulish lust … The thing was bloated and obscene; a headless, faceless, eyeless bulk with the ravenous maw and titanic talons of a starborn monster. The human blood on which it had fed revealed the hitherto invisible outlines of the feaster. It was not a sight for sane eyes to see.
The creature takes the copy of Prinn and departs. The narrator is terribly shaken by this and awaits his own demise by the awful thing.
Bloch knows his business as a Horror writer, even as early as 1935. He doesn’t show the monster, but uses other senses to tell us it is approaching. We can heard its insane mumbling and laughter. We can feel the cold of the abyss then the house being rent as the thing enters. Only after this do we see his friend rise up into the air, to be killed gruesomely. We can hear the blood being drained. And last, and only at the end, does the blood give the monster color enough to be seen. Vincent Napoli, as illustrator, shows us the final vision of the monster since drawing something invisible is hard.
All these great lessons go out the door when Marvel Comics adapted the story in Journey Into Mystery #3, February 1973. The story was rendered by the very able Ron Goulart but in a direction that did not appeal to me. In the comic version, the friend is drawn by Jim Starlin and Tom Palmer to look like Lovecraft but the narrator doesn’t resemble Bloch (which is too bad). The monster is never invisible and looks like an octopus cloud with a single eye. Again, disappointing since Jim Starlin was a boss in comics. (Tom Palmer’s ghoul in “Pickman’s Model” is even worse, but you’ll have to wait for that one.) Goulart seems more interested in the fate of narrator in a jail cell afterward than in the original encounter. For more on early Marvel Mythos, go here.
Like many of Lovecraft’s entities, the Shambler is meant to be indistinct and unnameable (to use a Lovecraftianism). Like so many tentacles that appear out of nowhere, the Shambler is a sudden and terrible thing. The name doesn’t really make sense though. To shamble is to walk in a slow and irregular way, denoting awkwardness and unsteadiness. Like a zombie. This creature doesn’t walk at all. It floats in the air. Lovecraft created “dimensional shamblers” in one of his revision tales but that creature seems unrelated. In Call of Cthulhu, the monster is called a Star Vampire, a much more accurate name.
I think it is also interesting that the monster takes the copy of Prinn before it departs. Usually, monsters aren’t into reading material, more blood and souls. I suspect Bloch did this to make his narrator more impotent in defeat. He can’t use the book to try and counter the doom he feels approaching. (He doesn’t try to find another copy either.) It adds to his helplessness.
Conclusion
Quibbling about names aside, the Star Vampire or Shambler is still one of my favorite monsters in the Mythos. I think its suddenness and nastiness are why. The clever use of the senses help make this very basic tale a lot of fun. I think it may have inspired Stephen King a little when he wrote “The Night Flier” (Prime Evil, 1988), another tale that hinges on the senses, though for a much more mundane reason. Watching vampire in a mirror while it is taking a leak is hardly the stuff of De Vermis Mysteriis. But it is the kind of tongue-in-cheek fun that Robert Bloch enjoyed. Stephen King certainly remembers Robert Bloch’s contributions to Horror well.
Mythos Horror at RAGE m a c h i n e
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