Robert Bloch (1) (1917–1994)

At this point, pretty much everyone alive knows that Norman Bates is a mad murderer because of Hitchcock's brilliant film (though I admit I only watched for the first time this year). But if you can suppress your knowledge enough, the book is a grimly fun read. There are multiple POVs, with Norman himself as a Nabakovian unreliable narrator. And the structure of the book helps to build a lot of suspense, as well as stand apart from the film's structure enough to be fresh. For those worried show more about gore, because of Hitchcock's vision, there is actually very little. The shower scene is almost a hiccup in just one paragraph, and not explicit at all. What stands out is the dark, deteriorating mind of Bates.

And no matter how much you try, you can't entirely suppress your knowledge of Norman as the baddie, so it's fun to read for the clues in the book left by Bloch for the unsuspecting reader as to truth. Very fun!

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended!!!!! show less

It says a lot about a book that can keep your interest even when the punchline is as well known as this one. Even if you haven't seen the movie you'd know the beats from cultural osmosis. Despite this, this is good enough to draw you in. The way Bloch uses ambiguity and makes you second-guess the inevitable conclusion is great, and reminds me a lot of The Exorcist. The use of a logical, skeptical progression and people doing what seems rational rather than the usual horror genre bollocks of show more characters having a temporary stroke that makes them come to insane conclusions or do the dumbest actions imaginable, is the key ingredient in this book, The Exorcist and virtually all great horror novels I've read.

The contrast between this and this year's Halloween Challenge nadir Midnight Mass is like night and day on that point specifically. show less

General consensus says that Bloch wrote this book in anger or as revenge for Hollywood making a Psycho II film without his consent. But if that is true, what did he hope to gain? This novel in no way affects the movie Psycho II, but it has managed to erase from my mind what it ever was that I liked about his novel Psycho in the first place and made me sure to avoid anything else he has ever written. So all he did was wound himself.

Because this book is foul. But also tedious.

The basic premise show more is that a couple of decades after the events of Psycho, Norman Bates escapes his hospital by murdering a couple of nuns. His psychiatrist, Adam Claiborne, guilty over his failures to Norman and victims, is convinced that Norman will head for Hollywood to stop the movie that is currently being made of his earlier crimes and heads out there to stop him.

The book is written from multiple perspectives but all the voices sound incredibly similar. They are all mean-spirited, often inner monologuing hateful thoughts about other characters. They are all interested in wordplay and psychoanalysing everyone. And absolutely every character in the book is OBSESSED with how things aren't like they were in the good old days.

The hateful characters make this an unpleasant read, because I didn't want to be in any of their heads. Everyone is combative and argues with each other in every conversation, which is exhausting and baffling to read. The endless psychoanalysing became dull quickly. After the initial bloodbath, there is almost no plot progression until the finale. It's just pages and pages of Claiborne 'reading' people because he is a psychiatrist, and Jan (the actor who has been cast as Mary Crane) 'reading' people because she is an actor. The themes that modern life is bad and violent, that Hollywood is garbage and that women are all... well, it is steeped in misogyny, are wearisome in their unpleasantness. Add in with all this nasty tedium multiple rape scenes and a random kitten murder, and I can't find anything of worth in this story.

It's a slog. Both nasty and boring. Then the climax just cuts straight to the epilogue, and Jan, who is the second main character of the novel, gets no resolution, so it can't even satisfy the story it is telling. This is one of those books that I only kept reading because I wanted it to be over.

Now, to be fair to Bloch, this book has a TWIST and I already knew what it was. Not all the details, just the basic fact. So that probably aided how dull I found the story. If you don't know the twist, there is probably a level of tension throughout that is absent if you do know it. However, although I didn't know the details, it immediately became completely obvious what was going on and it is hard to imagine people reading this not picking up on it. However, it is not worth reading even if you have been preserved from that particular spoiler. Bloch might think Hollywood is a cesspool, but his novel is a piece of sewage itself. show less

Reading *Psycho* more than sixty years after the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s film creates a strange problem for the novel. The book itself is strong—tight, psychological, and sharply written—but it has been overshadowed so completely by its own adaptation that much of the suspense no longer functions the way Bloch intended.

At the time of publication, the story’s structure depended on uncertainty. Robert Bloch slowly builds unease around Norman Bates, the isolated owner of a failing show more roadside motel. The novel carefully layers clues about Norman’s relationship with his mother and his fragile psychological state. For an original reader, the final revelation would have landed as a genuine shock.

Modern readers, however, approach the book with decades of cultural memory already in place. The ending is one of the most famous twists in cinema history, and it has been referenced, parodied, and discussed endlessly since the release of Hitchcock’s 1960 film. Because of that, the central mystery of the novel is almost impossible to encounter fresh. The reader is not discovering the truth alongside the characters—they are simply waiting for the story to reach a destination they already know.

That familiarity changes the experience significantly. Instead of suspense, the novel becomes an exercise in watching the mechanics of a twist slowly assemble itself. The tension that Bloch carefully constructs feels muted because the outcome is already part of popular culture.

This is unfortunate, because *Psycho* is genuinely a strong piece of psychological horror. Bloch’s version of Norman Bates is closer to the real-life inspiration behind the character, Ed Gein: middle-aged, socially isolated, and trapped in a decaying motel that mirrors his deteriorating mental state. The book leans more heavily into Norman’s internal world than the film does, which gives the story a colder and more unsettling psychological edge.

The result is a paradox. *Psycho* is an excellent novel that has been partially undermined by its own success. The film adaptation became so iconic that it permanently removed the element of surprise that originally powered the book. What remains is still well written and historically important, but it is difficult to read it today without feeling that the story’s greatest weapon—its revelation—has already been taken away by sixty years of cultural exposure.

In that sense, *Psycho* is a rare case of a great book being weakened not by the quality of its adaptation, but by the sheer cultural dominance of that adaptation. show less