Psycho

Psycho was published in 1959 and is the novel Robert Bloch is remembered for, although he had been writing horror and crime fiction since the 1930s and was a contributor to the pulp magazines of that era. He wrote it at the end of the decade, and the book is short, plain and quick: a hotel, a theft, a car, a woman who disappears and the people who come looking for her.

The novel's method is misdirection, and it depends on a piece of information the reader is given early and believes. Bloch writes Norman Bates as a polite, awkward, ordinary man with a hobby, and the reader is put at ease by him in exactly the way the other characters are. The mother in the house is present in the book as a voice and a set of opinions long before she is present in any other way, and the structure of the last third is built out of the difference between those two things.

Alfred Hitchcock's film version followed in 1960 and is the reason the name is in the culture, but Bloch's novel is a different object: less visual, more tightly shut inside its characters' heads, and free of the film's most famous technical tricks. Bloch returned to the story later with Psycho II in 1982 and Psycho House in 1990, neither of which has anything to do with the films that carried the same numbers. It is also, for all the notoriety, a domestic book: a failing business, a house that needs work, and a man whose only regular company is a voice from upstairs.