This is one of a series of posts I am doing as I read the short stories that have won the Hugo award since it was started in 1955.

It is interesting to think that the same year that this won the Hugo for Robert Block he was also publishing Psycho, which would become the celebrated Alfred Hitchcock film that helped to launch slasher film genre. Yet I did not know who Robert Block was before reading this story. Block, like many early Hugo winners, started their literary careers writing in a variety of genres and mediums before settling into a specific niche outside science fiction. As a result, many of them (like Block) vanished from my radar as a science fiction reader.

Of the early Hugo winners, The Hell-Bound Train seems the least like science fiction. Outside of an admiration for trains and railroads this story is completely devoid of science. A man makes a deal with the devil that inevitably leads to an important life lesson while allowing the man to weasel his way out of going to hell. The story is well written and puts its own unique spin on this story. Plus, the writing is quite contemporary with many fun 1950s pop culture references.

My favorite was a reference to someone looking like Kim Novak, who was the female lead in Vertigo, which was the film Hitchcock made before Psycho. While Block could not have known that Hitchcock would adapt his work in two years this is a nice bit of synchronicity. It also illustrates how Block’s writing really seems appropriate for film and television, where he eventually settled for most of his writing career. Indeed, this entire story reads like an episode from The Twilight Zone.

All of this does not take away from Block’s excellent writing or legacy. Block’s win also serves as an interesting illustration of how little recognition there was for works of speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc.) in the 1950s. As a result, a variety of speculative fiction outside science fiction found its way into the early Hugos unlike today’s Hugos that are focused on science fiction.

Source: The Hugo Winners Edited by Isaac Asimov