Description

The Opener of the Way – by Robert Bloch

Paperback – Valencourt Books – January 2025 – 324 pages

Robert Bloch’s name is known to most readers today only as the author of Psycho, the inspiration for the famous Hitchcock film, but he was in fact a remarkably prolific author, publishing countless short stories over a sixty-year span, along with over thirty novels. The Opener of the Way (1945), published by the legendary Arkham House, was Bloch’s first book, collecting twenty-one of his early tales from pulp magazines like Weird Tales, including some of his best. Featured here are “The Shambler from the Stars” (1935), a classic story set in the Lovecraftian Mythos, where Lovecraft himself appears as a character, the title story “The Opener of the Way” (1936), in which a man’s quest to open a statue of Anubis in an Egyptian tomb goes horribly awry, and one of Bloch’s most celebrated tales, “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (1943), in which two men hunt for the serial killer in 1940s Chicago, alongside numerous other Bloch gems.