The Twelve Frights of Christmas

Robert Albert Bloch was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of German-Jewish Americans. During the 1930s, he was an avid reader of Weird Tales magazine and H. P. Lovecraft in particular. He wrote to Lovecraft, who responded with advice on writing, and Bloch sold his first published short story, "The Feast in the Abbey" to Weird Tales when he was just seventeen. He continued to write for Weird Tales and went on to become one of its most popular authors, while also contributing to other magazines. In 1946, his first published novel, The Scarf, was released. He received the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1959 for “That Hell-Bound Train” (1958). Also in 1959, he published one of his best-known novels, Psycho, which was adapted for the screen in 1960 by Joseph Stefano, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. He wrote the screenplay for the movie The Night Walker (1964), and he also wrote three scripts for the television show Star Trek. Over the course of his career, he wrote hundreds of short stories and over twenty novels, mostly in the crime fiction, science fiction and, horror fiction genres.