If you want a single volume that slaps the chalice out of Lovecraft’s hand, pisses in Poe’s punch bowl, and moonwalks through a mausoleum while reciting the Necronomicon backwards for giggles, it’s Robert Bloch’s The Opener of the Way. Published in 1945 by Arkham House—yes, that Arkham House—this debut collection kicked open a lot more than just tomb doors. It booted American horror into the modern era wearing clown shoes soaked in embalming fluid and irony. I’m not sure what that fucking means, but it feels right.

Now, 80 years on, it still hits like a shovel to the skull.

Before he carved his name into pop culture with Psycho (yes, that Psycho), Robert Bloch was a teenage protege of H.P. Lovecraft. But unlike so many other Mythos suck-ups, Bloch didn’t just trace over Cthulhu’s tentacles. He cracked the cosmic horror mold with a crooked grin and added a potent new ingredient: the deeply human, deeply funny macabre. What if Lovecraft could write dialogue that didn’t sound like a thesaurus had a panic attack?

The stories in The Opener of the Way were mostly published in Weird Tales between 1934 and 1945, when Bloch was in his teens and twenties. Let that sink in. While you were still learning how to lie convincingly about reading Infinite Jest, Bloch was inventing half the horror archetypes that would later feed generations of pulp, film, and goth kids with Anubis tattoos.

This book is a damn mausoleum filled with 21 horror stories, each more unhinged than the last. You get cursed Egyptian artifacts (The Faceless God, The Opener of the Way), psychosexual fever dreams (The Mandarin’s Canaries), Hollywood necromancy (Return to the Sabbath), and undead slapstick (The Cloak). And then there’s Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper, the story that made urban legends wish they had literary agents.

The themes? Death, madness, revenge, identity loss, and cosmic horror with a side of gallows humor. If a young devil ever compiled his high school yearbook, this would be it.

Fear of the Other – Whether it’s ancient Egyptian gods, Haitian snake cults, or bloodsuckers in a penthouse, Bloch repeatedly returns to the horror of the foreign invading the familiar. But unlike Lovecraft’s xenophobic tone, Bloch often critiques the protagonist’s arrogant Western attitudes. They deserve what’s coming.

Madness and Identity Loss – Many of Bloch’s characters walk around with big brains and bigger egos. They want forbidden knowledge, but they’re about as stable as wet papier-mâché. They’re not heroes, but rather cautionary tales in pants.

Death as Comedy – The wildest theme? Death is not sacred, rather treated as a punchline. In The Cloak, vampirism is played for laughs and then sucker-punched with a cruel twist. It’s meta before meta was a thing, long before Scream figured out how to make horror self-aware.

Performance and Persona – Whether it’s failed writers, hack actors, or fake mystics, Bloch loathes pretenders. And then he feeds them to monsters. This is horror written by a guy who knows showbiz is just a long con with better lighting.

Robert Bloch’s writing is the bridge between Lovecraft’s purple-drenched doom and Richard Matheson’s lean, mean horror machine. When he’s aping Lovecraft early on (The Secret of Sebek), you can hear the adjectives sweating. But when his own voice kicks in—dry, ironic, and cold as a grave hug—holy hell does it sing.

Bloch’s gift is making even the grotesque feel human. He doesn’t describe monsters so much as impersonate them from the inside. Every narrator is a little too proud, a little too greedy, a little too close to snapping. That’s not just cosmic horror, but psychological precision. Lovecraft gave us the fear of the unknowable. Bloch gives us the fear of knowing exactly what you are, deep down.

Standout Stories

• The Cloak – Arguably the first self-aware vampire comedy, decades before Fright Night or What We Do in the Shadows. Ends like a slap in the face with a shovel.
• Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper – Still one of the best horror stories of the 20th century. An immortal serial killer hiding in plain sight. One of Stephen King’s favorites. Deservedly.
• The Opener of the Way – If Indiana Jones accidentally joined the Church of Nyarlathotep and got eaten by his own plot devices, it’d look like this. The titular tale has a lingering, apocalyptic dread that anticipates Clive Barker by decades.
• Return to the Sabbath – Old Hollywood + necromancy = a literal resurrection of the idea that film is ritual magic. Campy but deeply unsettling.
• The Mandarin’s Canaries – What if sadism was gourmet? Pure, decadent horror. Bloch’s prose here slips into baroque like an opium-addled Victorian before yanking your guts out with tweezers.

Not every corpse in this crypt is fresh. Bloch’s early pastiches of Lovecraft (The Faceless God, The Feast in the Abbey) can feel like imitation séances. There’s occasional racism and Orientalist weirdness typical of the era, particularly in Mother of Serpents and The Secret of Sebek. These aren’t dealbreakers, but they’re glaring. Also, Bloch sometimes relies on a punchline structure. A shocking ending can be great for pulp, but occasionally undermines the emotional resonance. Horror shouldn’t always need a mic drop.

Bloch wasn’t the first horror writer, but he was the first to blend fear, satire, and psychological rot in this way. His prose is occasionally bloated early on, but hits its stride mid-collection with sharp, cinematic clarity. At its best, The Opener of the Way still slaps harder than most of what’s on the shelves today. From cosmic horror to satire of artistic pretension, this thing goes places. While not flawless, this collection is unforgettable. Still holding court at the haunted head table.

Final word?
Robert Bloch wasn’t just opening the way. He was kicking down the door, flicking cigarette ash on the carpet of polite horror fiction, and whispering, “You’re next.”

TL;DR: Robert Bloch’s The Opener of the Way is the ur-text for smart, savage, subversive horror. 80 years old and it still kicks like a mule with a grudge. If Lovecraft opened a door to cosmic dread, Bloch walked through it flipping the bird and telling jokes about it afterward.