Mentioning Robert Bloch put me in the mood to read something by him, and “The Faceless God”, originally published in the May 1936 issue of WEIRD TALES and also available in THE CTHULHU MYTHOS MEGAPACK, was handy.
There are SPOILERS BELOW, so beware.
This starts out with a very graphic and disturbing torture scene, as a smuggler and criminal tries to extract the location of a potentially valuable find in the Egyptian desert from an old man. The thing is the head of a statue that was buried in the sand sometime in ages past, but the constantly shifting dunes have uncovered it. Getting wind of the discovery, the crook wants the statue for himself, figuring that it’s bound to be worth a lot of money. The old man can’t hold up under the torture and finally reveals the statue’s location before dying.
This is basically the story’s prologue, and in the hands of, say, Robert E. Howard, “The Faceless God” would have been a corking yarn, as one of REH’s adventurer heroes would have gone after the statue, too, and clashed violently with the bad guy before the statue—which turns out to be that of an ancient Egyptian elder god—enters the fray in bloody and dramatic fashion.
But that’s not what happens. The bad guy goes after the statue, finds it, and terrible things ensue. Needless to say, it’s all very well-written. Bloch was a great storyteller. It’s just that he chooses not to tell much of a story here.
I’m a firm believer in reviewing the story the author wrote, not the one I wish he had written, so I feel bad saying I found “The Faceless God” to be a disappointment. As I said, the writing is excellent, and on that basis alone, I’m glad I read it, and it certainly won’t keep me from reading other stories by Bloch in the future. This one is a bit of a misfire for me, but it might not be for you. If you haven’t read it and want to give it a try, it’s been reprinted numerous times, most notably in the Bloch collections YOURS TRULY, JACK THE RIPPER, THE OPENER OF THE WAY, and MYSTERIES OF THE WORM.
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