Psycho

Robert Bloch

What It’s About

         It was a dark and stormy night when Mary Crane glimpsed the unlit neon sign announcing the vacancy at the Bates motel. Exhausted, lost, and at the end of her rope, she was eager for a hot shower and a bed for the night. Her room was musty but clean and the plumbing worked. Norman Bates, the manager, seemed nice, if a little odd.

My Take

         Like the book, this review is going to be short (I’d say “short and sweet,” but this is a horror novel, and I feel like sweet isn’t the best adjective to use here).

            I watched the movie based on this book back when I was in middle school.  I had a slumber party for my birthday in seventh grade and my friends and I decided we wanted to rent a horror movie.  Almost thirty years later, I learned the book existed, and mentally chastised myself for not knowing that fact.  My horror book club picked this book for one of our monthly selections, and that’s how I learned there was indeed a book that was written prior to the movie. 

            Bloch wrote a relatively short and to the point novel about a very troubled young man.  Norman Bates resides in an ominous house on a hill behind an aging roadside motel.  The entire book spans only a few days, but it packs a lot into a small number of pages.  Norman seems to have a volatile relationship with his mother, and takes solace in the booze he hides away in the office of the motel.  When Mary Crane pulled into the parking lot, Norman seemed excited to have the company.  Everything unraveled pretty quickly, and just became worse for Norman and his mother when people came along asking questions about Mary. 

            Bloch wasn’t a man of many words, and he certainly didn’t waste any with this novel.  He wrote with an almost clinical accuracy leaving little to the imagination while at the same time being as concise as possible.  There was no embellishment or unnecessarily loquacious descriptions.  Block was able to convey the story of a man suffering from dissociative identity disorder, which was then (still is today) an exceptionally rare diagnosis.  Norman was also a cross-dresser (the term used in the book), which is something else that was not discussed very much in 1959.  This book tackled a couple of controversial topics while being an exceptionally creepy tale.

            There’s a reason why this is considered a classic.