🎬 Experience the atmospheric visual edition plus narrator intro and outro of this double feature by searching “Jonathan Dunne Horror” on YouTube.
Number: 130
Title: The Black Kiss & The Laughter of a Ghoul
Series Name: Timeless Terrors
Series Entry: 130
Author: Robert Bloch
Narrator: Jonathan Dunne
Original Publication: 1935 / 1937
Public Domain: No
Description:
This double bill of early Robert Bloch tales showcases the youthful ferocity and macabre imagination that would later define one of horror’s most influential voices.
The Black Kiss explores occult obsession and the perilous allure of forbidden knowledge. A young man becomes entangled in the sinister legacy of a dead sorcerer whose experiments in dark rites have left behind more than mere manuscripts. As curiosity deepens into complicity, Bloch charts a chilling descent into spiritual corruption — where evil is intimate, seductive, and sealed with a gesture both symbolic and damning.
The Laughter of a Ghoul turns from arcane ritual to graveyard dread. Here, morbid fascination with death invites something hideous and hungry from beneath the earth. As mocking, inhuman laughter echoes through moonlit cemeteries, the boundary between unhealthy fixation and supernatural visitation collapses. Bloch blends psychological instability with pulp-era grotesquery, crafting a tale where decay is not passive — it watches, waits, and feeds.
Together, these stories reveal Bloch’s early mastery of atmosphere: forbidden books, whispering darkness, grave-soil and corruption, and protagonists whose own weaknesses open the door to horror. Rather than vast cosmic indifference, the terror here is personal — a corruption of body, mind, and soul.
Narrated by Amazon bestselling horror author Jonathan Dunne, this performance captures both tales’ brooding tension, morbid intensity, and their final, lingering chill — bringing Bloch’s early macabre visions vividly and disturbingly to life.
