Psycho
Psycho, horror novel by written by prolific American author Robert Bloch, published in 1959. Bloch, a protégé of H.P. Lovecraft, was known for his crime and psychological horror stories, and many of his stories were adapted for radio, movies, and television. Psycho is his best-known work.
The chilling reputation of Bloch’s thriller has been somewhat overshadowed by Alfred Hitchcock’s renowned film adaptation, but Psycho is worth reading for its relentless buildup of psychological horror. The story opens at the Bates Motel, run-down and rarely visited since a highway bypassed the place. Norman Bates, the middle-aged proprietor, is having an argument with his mother. He puts on the open sign. Mary Crane, who has just stolen a large sum of money from her boss in order to help her boyfriend, Sam, pay off his debts, arrives at the Bates Motel. The initial interest is firmly focused on Mary’s story and her wavering over whether she should return the money. Norman invites her to dinner at the house he shares with his mother. He complains to Mary about his mother, and Mary suggests she should be taken to a psychiatric hospital. Norman is enraged, and Mary goes back to her room, where she decides to take the money back to the bank. Feeling relieved, she takes a shower.
Someone enters Mary’s bathroom. The shower curtain opens, revealing an old woman, who stabs and decapitates Mary. Norman has several drinks and then passes out. When he comes to, he goes to Mary’s room and discovers that she has been murdered. Assuming that his mother killed her, he cleans up the crime scene and puts Mary’s body in her car, which he then sinks in a nearby swamp. Meanwhile, Mary’s sister, Lila, arrives at the hardware store owned by Sam and tells him Mary has been missing for a week. They are interrupted by Milton Arbogast, a private investigator hired by Mary’s boss. After Sam convinces him that he knows nothing about the theft or Mary’s disappearance, Arbogast heads out to follow a lead.
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Later Arbogast calls from the Bates Motel, where he has traced Mary. He plans to question Norman’s mother, whose face he saw in a window. However, Norman’s mother also kills Arbogast, and Norman hides his body in the swamp as well. When Arbogast’s expected call never comes in, Sam and Lila go to the sheriff’s office and tell him what has happened. The sheriff calls Norman, who tells him that Arbogast has gone to Chicago because he believes Mary was headed there. The sheriff tells Lila and Sam that Arbogast could not have seen Norman’s mother, because she had died years ago.
Frustrated by the sheriff’s lack of interest, Sam and Lila check into the Bates Motel under false names and insist on being placed in the room Mary had occupied. They find one of Mary’s earrings and some dried blood there, so Sam goes to distract Norman while Lila goes to the sheriff. Norman tells Sam that he had resurrected his mother and that Lila is not going to the sheriff but to his house, and then he knocks Sam out. The sheriff arrives and wakes Sam up, just as Lila discovers Norman’s mother’s mummified body in the cellar of the house. Later, Norman is institutionalized.
Bloch was influenced by the arrest of serial murderer Ed Gein, a handyman and sometime babysitter who lived on a farm in Wisconsin and was found to have dismembered the bodies of his victims. The idea of having a double identity, of being an apparently normal member of the community and yet a crazed psychopath at the same time, was fused into Bloch’s novel.
With Psycho, Bloch was reflecting the growing contemporary interest in the complexities of the human mind and the ways in which it can go wrong. This example of the thriller genre marked a move away from concern with horror from external factors to the internal horrors of the mind. The novel gives us a far more detailed and, for that reason, more frightening insight into Norman’s psychopathic condition than is possible in movies and is, in its own medium, just as memorable.
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