The black kiss — Themes and Context

Planned Dreams and the Doctor’s Skepticism

The opening scene establishes a clinical frame that the story will steadily dismantle. Graham Dean describes his nightmares as “cumulative” and “planned,” but Doctor Hedwig dismisses them as “imagination and overwork.” The dialogue is crisp and naturalistic, grounding the supernatural in a recognizable setting. Dean’s physical deterioration—blue rings under his eyes, bloodless pallor—is presented as evidence the doctor cannot explain away. A telling detail: Dean’s seascape sketches acquire a “quality of malignness” he did not intend, suggesting an external force corrupting his art. This motif of the artist’s work being invaded by an alien will recurs throughout the text. The doctor’s reliance on notes and his refusal to entertain the supernatural mirror the reader’s own initial skepticism, a setup that makes the later revelations more unsettling.

The Warning from Doctor Yamada

A second doctor, Yamada, introduces a different explanatory framework: the supernatural. He speaks of an ancient evil and warns Dean that “alone you cannot hope to resist.” The story’s structure here mirrors a classic horror pattern—the rational explanation fails, and an occult expert steps in. Yamada’s question—“has the thing kissed you?”—is the story’s central image, never fully explained in the excerpts. Dean lies in response, and the narrative immediately shifts into a dissociative state: “He seemed incapable of coherent thought.” The prose becomes fragmented, with Dean observing his own actions from a distance. This technique of splitting the protagonist’s consciousness is used repeatedly to convey possession or trance. The setting moves from Yamada’s house to a car to a bed, but the unifying element is the sound of surf, which “spoke to him now” as he climbs out a window toward the beach.

The Trance Journey and the Sea Creatures

The third section opens with a jolt: “With a shock, he was himself once more—completely.” Dean finds himself swimming in the ocean during a storm, but feels “fully alive” for the first time in a month. The narrative voice shifts to a detached, almost euphoric tone, as if Dean is being “directed in all his movements.” This loss of volition is the story’s core structural device—the protagonist becomes a passenger in his own body. The description of the creatures on the beach is deliberately vague: “dim suggestions of past horror in their tenebrous outlines.” The story withholds clear visual details, relying instead on atmospheric cues like “pale, fog-like glow” and “lashing waters.” This restraint heightens the sense of the uncanny. The section ends with Dean approaching the things in the surf, but the excerpts cut off before the climax, leaving the nature of the “black kiss” ambiguous.

Recurring Images and the Sea as Character

Throughout the excerpts, the sea is not merely a setting but an active presence. It is described with verbs of intention: the surf “spoke to him,” the water “beckoned,” and the blackness “engulfed” his brain. The color green recurs—the “green, shining place under the sea,” the epigraph’s “green robes”—linking the underwater realm to decay and alien life. Blackness appears as both literal shadow and psychological void: “the black, hungry shadows that were like the darkness surging through his soul.” The story’s structure mirrors the tide’s rhythm, alternating between periods of lucidity and immersion in dream. The doctors’ offices and the beach are the two poles between which Dean oscillates. This binary movement—confinement in rooms versus surrender to the sea—creates a claustrophobic tension that the truncated excerpts only partially resolve.

The excerpts end before the story’s resolution, but the pattern is clear: Dean’s agency erodes with each transition. Readers should attend to the way the narrative voice shifts between first-person interiority and third-person observation, and how the sea’s sounds and colors invade even the dialogue scenes. The collaboration between Bloch and Kuttner may account for the story’s dual structure—clinical and mythic—but the excerpts offer no evidence of seams. The title’s promise of a “kiss” remains the central enigma, best approached by tracking the story’s careful escalation from skepticism to trance.

Reading that Bloch and Kuttner tale, I kept circling back to how both their horror and Rohmer’s spring from something deeper than plot—a slow, almost unwilling surrender to another presence. There’s a similar shadow in The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu — Themes and Context, where fascination and dread blur into one quiet, constant hum that never quite leaves the room.