Fear Today—Gone Tomorrow by Robert Bloch

 

(pb; 1971)

From the back cover

“HORROR—

“Harvey Wolf had his first taste of it when a witch doctor offered him a warm red drink from a hollowed skull—and Harvey developed cravings that nothing in this world could ever satisfy.

“HORROR—

“Crothers created it when he devised a much-too-successful solution to population control: a Madison-Avenue-launched suicide craze that swept the globe—and swept it clean.

“HORROR—

“Dave Larson looked into its eyes and read its history—as ancient as tribal sacrifice, as destructive as war, as bloody as the hands of a mass murderer. And then he become its most devoted servant.

“HORROR—

“The men of Earth invited it when they under-estimated the power of a woman—Venutian variety—and discovered, too late, that lovers can sometimes be terrifying strangers.”

 

Review

Bloch’s Fear, about aliens plotting the acceleration of mankind’s demise, is an ambitious, often darkly clever (a Blochian trademark) and piece-meal work, one advertised as a novel. It should’ve been back cover-blurbed (and advertised) as a loosely linked anthology, given how many word-sketched and loosely linked characters play their parts in Fear’s wide-ranging and blink-and-you’ll-lose-track storyline(s) before the characters permanently disappear (usually for good reason). Also, Fear jumps around a lot, a la Ray Bradbury’s theme- and location-based story collection The Martian Chronicles (1950), but where Bradbury’s iconic work succeeds, Bloch’s feels (too) abstract, dialogue-chatty, and scatter-shot in its thematic arc to be effective or reader-rewarding in its wrap-up. By the time this reader got to the end, I was just glad it was over, despite its sly wit, fast pacing, and wild genre elements (with mythic sourcing—hello, Minerva).

A hard-to-follow novel by a great writer, this is best read as a story anthology, with a loosely defined theme (humanity is likely doomed), buoyed in fleeting parts by Bloch’s black wit and (sometimes, in this case) tight set-ups and events. Worth reading, with the right expectations.