Blog-o-ween 2023: "Sweets to the Sweet" by Robert Bloch

“As a matter of fact, I am really a very lovable person, as my friends tell me — or they would, if I had any friends. Deep down underneath it all, I have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar, on my desk.”

— Robert Bloch

Kids are weird. There’s just no getting around the fact. They’re weird, and they are dangerous. I wouldn’t trust a one of them for all the money in Fort Knox. Not for a second. Sure, the more highfalutin members of the PMRC, the local PTA, and various other parents groups wan’cha to believe that little Johnny and Jenny are innocent angels who need to be protected from the big, bad world. BAH! Little Johnny would stick a knife in yer back before you could say “Jack Robinson.” And little Jenny? Well, I think today’s story by Robert Bloch perfectly illustrates what she’s capable of.

“Irma didn’t look like a witch. She had small, regular features, a peaches-and-cream complexion, blue eyes, and fair, almost ash-blonde hair. Besides, she was only eight years old.”

Thus begins Bloch’s 1947 short story “Sweets to the Sweet.” In it, little Irma Steever, eight years old and sweet as pie, is a motherless child whose father, John Steever, blames for the death of his wife during childbirth. He constantly refers to her as an “unnatural little witch” and tells her nanny that all the child really needs is a “good thrashing.” Irma is a preternaturally intelligent child who reads voraciously — things like the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s entry on “Witchcraft.” That’s not the only craft she’s interested in. She likes making little dolls out of modeling clay. Why, just recently, she made one that looks exactly like her father! She takes it with her wherever she goes. And speaking of father, the poor man, he doesn’t seem to be feeling very well at the moment. Seems as though he’s been having pains in his arm, in his back, and in his chest. Sharp, jabbing pain...like a needle being plunged into the flesh...

“Sweets to the Sweet” first appeared in the March 1947 issue of Weird Tales magazine. Over the next fifty years, the story would be included in many of the author’s “Best of” collections, as well as countless anthologies. I first encountered the story in the 2007 edition of Mike Baker and Martin H. Greenberg’s anthology My Favorite Horror Story, where it was chosen for inclusion by none other than Stephen King, who claimed it to have “one of the most chilling snap endings I had ever read.”

Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1917 and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Robert Bloch had a long and storied (pun intended!) career. He wrote horror, science-fiction, thrillers, short stories, novels, screenplays, and an “unauthorized autobiography” called Once Around the Bloch. He exchanged letters with H. P. Lovecraft and his circle of friends, including August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, and Frank Belknap Long. He was presented with the Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention in 1975 and the Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement from the Horror Writers Association in 1989. Robert Bloch died of cancer in 1994.

All that aside, what we remember Bloch for most is writing a story about another misunderstood child with (dead) mommy issues. A child who grew up to be a man who ran the cutest little motel just off the old highway. A man who went a little mad sometimes...but that’s okay...we all go a little mad sometimes...don’t we?

If you find it a little hard to track down a printed copy of “Sweets to the Sweet,” don’t worry, we gotcha covered. The good folks over at HorrorBabble, the internet’s premier source for audio horror in its many forms, recorded a rendition of Ian Gordon and Jennifer Gill reading Bloch’s tale a few years ago in August of 2021. You can find that recording here on YouTube.

Pleasant listening and...pleasant dreams...hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

It is 10 October. There are 21 days until Halloween

I’ve mentioned before how seeing Day of the Triffids on TV one Saturday afternoon when I was a kid changed the way I felt about being in the woods. Every tree and every plant my size or taller became a potential meat-eating Triffid. Any clicking or tapping I heard weren’t squirrels or woodpeckers. No! They were Triffids signaling to each other that there was a yummy meal in sneakers and a Han Solo t-shirt coming their way.

Thank god I didn’t read Algernon Blackwood’s novella “The Willows” as a kid, too. I never would have left the house let alone gone back into the woods.

Blackwood’s tale of eco-horror is, like so many tales of terror from the early 20th century, a slow burn. Over four chapters, Blackwood slowly builds and layers the horrors to a frightening climax as the two men trapped on that sandy island on the River Danube realize what may be in the woods. Blackwood, however, never fully divulges the identity of the entities that are stalking the men. What are they doing? What do they want? What are they even? Blackwood reveals nothing that would help explain away the horror in the willows.

The deeply mysterious nature of things outside human understanding – are they gods or monsters, and is there a difference between the two? – is one of the reasons H.P. Lovecraft considered “The Willows” his favorite story of cosmic horror:

"Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note.”

Blackwood’s tale seems ripe for a motion picture production. The ambiguity and slow-burn creeping dread seem perfect for a movie in the vein of The VVitch or The Lighthouse.

You can find the story in its entirety here. Surprisingly, as well as disappointingly, there doesn’t seem to be an old-time radio program that took on the tale, but, as always, the good folks at HorrorBabble have recorded an excellent audio version.