The black kissRobert Bloch Henry KuttnerOmniClassics · Literature
The black kiss
Robert Bloch Henry KuttnerAn artist's dreams of the sea grow increasingly deliberate after he inherits a house on the California coast.
Progress is saved in this browser
About the book
Graham Dean moves into an inherited house near San Pedro hoping to paint the surrounding coast. Instead, his sleep fills with recurring underwater visions, and even his pictures acquire a threatening quality he never intended to give them. A doctor attributes the trouble to overwork and an impressionable imagination, but Dean finds that explanation inadequate: his dreams began before he learned the house's disturbing history. That history centers on Morella Godolfo, an ancestor surrounded by stories of unnatural longevity and a sinister relationship with the sea. Bloch and Kuttner draw the horror from the shrinking distance between an artist's inner images and an apparently independent intelligence. The familiar attraction of the ocean becomes a summons whose meaning Dean cannot safely ignore.
- Ancestral fear
- Dreams and identity
- The threatening sea
Why read it
The corruption of Dean's own seascapes makes his artistic sensitivity an unusually intimate source of dread.
English story from Weird Tales, June 1937