Who needs a memory?

[pyat]

For years, I've had dim memories of reading Robert Bloch's last published work, in Omni magazine. The horror author was one of H.P. Lovecraft's penpals, and the writer of Psycho. Part of me thinks Lovecraft would have sent Bloch an angry letter about Psycho.

The essay was significant, first of all, because it was message from a dead man, about his approaching death. Bloch wrote it a just days before he died, and he knew he was dying. It was published just days after his death.

Secondly, it was significant to me, because I remembered him raving about inferior races of humanity in it. And I went around telling people that Robert Bloch was a racist. Just now, I used the net to look up the date of the issue, and then went down to the basement to dig around for it. Lo and behold, it was the sitting right at the top of the box, ready to hand.

And, it turns out that Robert Bloch was not a racist, at least not in this essay. He just made a single wry comment about how he's an elitist and didn't think all men were equal, except under the law. Not the same thing at all.

My brain had embroidered that single statement extensively over the last 15 years.

Comments

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

These things happen. I placed similar and rather unbalanced emotional weight on a few things Harlan Ellison once said, but a) that from stuff he wrote in the early Seventies and b) I only later found out Harlan was insufferable for a great many reasons anyway.