Robert Albert Bloch (/blɒk/; April 5, 1917 – September 23, 1994) was an American fiction writer, primarily of crime, psychological horror and fantasy, much of which has been dramatized for radio, cinema and television.

The scene of Chaney removing his mask terrified the young Bloch ("it scared the living hell out of me and I ran all the way home to enjoy the first of about two years of recurrent nightmares").

[12] Bloch wrote: "In school I was forced to squirm my way through the works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

His horror themes included voodoo ("Mother of Serpents"), the conte cruel ("The Mandarin's Canaries"), demonic possession ("Fiddler's Fee"), and black magic ("Return to the Sabbat").

In 1935 Bloch joined a writers' group, The Milwaukee Fictioneers, members of which included Stanley Weinbaum, Ralph Milne Farley and Raymond A. Palmer.

[24] In 1939, Bloch was contacted by James Doolittle, who was managing the campaign for Mayor of Milwaukee of a little-known assistant city attorney named Carl Zeidler.

Shortly thereafter, Bloch created the Damon Runyon-esque humorous series character Lefty Feep in the story "Time Wounds All Heels" Fantastic Adventures (April 1942).

[29] Towards the end of World War Two, in 1945, Bloch was asked to write 39 15-minute episodes of his own radio horror show called Stay Tuned for Terror.

Bloch's first novel was published in hardcover – the thriller The Scarf (The Dial Press 1947; the Fawcett Gold medal paperback of 1966 features a revised text).

The story begins in Minneapolis and follows him and his trail of dead bodies to Chicago, New York City, and finally Hollywood, where his hit novel is going to be turned into a movie, and where his self-control may have reached its limit.

Bloch had written an earlier short story involving dissociative identity disorder, "The Real Bad Friend", which appeared in the February 1957 Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, that foreshadowed the 1959 novel Psycho.

"[32] Though Bloch had little involvement with the film version of his novel, which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock from an adapted screenplay by Joseph Stefano, he was to become most famous as its author.

Today, due to public domain status, the episode is readily available in home media formats from numerous distributors and is even available on free video on demand.

In the early 1960s he published several novels, including The Dead Beat (1960), and Firebug (1961), for which Harlan Ellison, then an editor at Regency Books, contributed the first 1,200 words.

[39] That year several Bloch short story collections – Atoms and Evil, More Nightmares and Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper – were published, as well as another novel, Terror (whose working titles included Amok and Kill for Kali).

In 1964 Bloch married Eleanor Alexander and wrote original screenplays for two films produced and directed by William Castle, Strait-Jacket (1964) and The Night Walker (also 1964), along with The Skull (1965).

Following the movie The Skull (1965), which was based on a Bloch story but scripted by Milton Subotsky, he wrote the screenplays for five feature films produced by Amicus Productions – The Psychopath (1966), The Deadly Bees (co-written with Anthony Marriott, 1967), Torture Garden (also 1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1971) and Asylum (1972).

Bloch commented: "Instead, I suggested a blending of the elements of several well-remembered films, and came up with a story line which dealt with the Egyptian cat-goddess (Bast), reincarnation and the first bypass operation ever performed on an artichoke heart.

[43] Bloch meanwhile (interspersed between his screenplays for Amicus Productions and other projects), penned single episodes for Night Gallery (1971), Ghost Story (1972), The Manhunter (1974), and Gemini Man (1976).

His novel The Star Stalker was published, and Dragons and Nightmares (the first collection of Lefty Feep stories) appeared in hardcover (Mirage Press).

That same year, Bloch was invited to the Second International Film Festival in Rio de Janeiro, March 23–31, along with other science fiction writers from the United States, Britain and Europe.

1979 saw the publication of Bloch's novel There is a Serpent in Eden (also reissued as The Cunning), and two more short story collections, Out of the Mouths of graves and Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of.

No further screen work appeared in the last five years before his death, although an adaptation of his "collaboration" with Edgar Allan Poe, "The Lighthouse", was filmed as an episode of The Hunger in 1998.

In 1986, Scream Press published the hardcover omnibus Unholy Trinity, collecting three by now scarce Bloch novels, The Scarf, The Dead Beat, and The Couch.

Underwood-Miller issued the three-volume hardcover set The Selected Stories of Robert Bloch (individual volumes titled Final Reckonings, Bitter Ends and Last Rites).

A standalone chapbook of the story "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" was issued in both hardcover and paperback by Pulphouse, and Bloch co-edited with Martin H. Greenberg the original anthology Psycho-Paths (Tor).

[48] After working for 11 years for the Gustav Marx Advertising Agency in Milwaukee, Bloch left in 1953 and moved to Weyauwega, Marion's home town, so she could be close to friends and family.

See also 42nd World Science Fiction Convention In 2020, he was inducted into the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards' Monster Kid Hall of Fame.

Many of Bloch's published works, manuscripts (including those of the novels The Star Stalker, This Crowded Earth, and Night World), correspondence, books, recordings, tapes and other memorabilia are housed in the Special Collections division of the library at the University of Wyoming.

The collection includes several unpublished short stories, such as "Dream Date", "The Last Clown", "A Pretty Girl is Like a Malady", "Twilight of a God", "It Only Hurts When I Laugh", "How to Pull the Wings Off a Barfly", "The Craven Image", "Afternoon in the Park", "Title Bout", and 'What Freud Can't Tell You".