Sometimes we all go a little bit crazy. my love affair with Norman Bates

Lets say hello here with a little book that deserves a whole hell of a lot of attention.  First published in 1959 Robert Bloch's Psycho would go on to world wide fame when it was adapted to the screen by Alfred Hitchcock.

My first memory of Psycho is the film.  We had a copy of it on laser disc back in the day.  This wasn't the nice laser disc. This was the awkward laser disc that that needed to be turned over in the middle of the movie and was prone to lots of skipping.

I also remember, back in the early 80's keeping a scrapbook full of ads and articles from the newspaper advertising horror films. One of my favorites was the ad for Psycho II.

Of all the slasher films (and Psycho II is definitely a slasher film), I have always had a soft spot for Norman Bates.  I think some of my love for these films is because Anthony Perkins is so darned cute.

Speaking of cute.  I think its charming that in a later revisit to the crazy little hotel just outside of Fairvale -- out on the old highway-- that young Norman was played by none other than Elliot. Remember him? ET's bud. In Psycho IV, his relationship with mom can be described as very, very, very close.

Here is the review I posted to Goodreads:

READ THIS BOOK! READ IT NOW! My mother recommended this book to me (for some reason she thought I would enjoy it) and boy does she have good taste.

The biggest problem this book has (and the problem is effing huge) is the classic film by Hitchcock. Norman Bates and his mother are fixtures in our cinematic consciousness. The film is great, and it does play fair by the novel; however, the film is not the novel. The novel has strengths that differentiate it from the film and make it well worth a read by today's audience.

If Henry James and Robert Louis Stevens had a love child, that child would be Robert Bloch. Bloch has written an American version of Jekyll and Hyde. This novel is quick with two solid hits and a knock out. The prose is economical, the characters are taut, believable, and never fully revealed to us.

How to classify this novel? Is it a whodunit? Is it horror? Is it a crime novel? Yes. The novel keeps its secrets hidden in plain sight. Told through the perspective of fragmented characters who are driven by impulse, desire and the id. Psycho is a Freudian nightmare of epic proportions. At the same time, the novel draws upon the American landscape and twists it: the sense that just off the main road lies not the freedom of the cowboy but madness and death. The dream of starting over as a path to Hell. The book also plays with the idea that just behind our notion of the perfect family, the perfect home, lies dark and hideous secrets. This is Martha Stewart meet Ed Gein. Just to reiterate, this short novel takes our American prejudices about family, individualism, and small town values and slashes the hell out of them and leaves the corpse in our bathroom.

If you haven't read this novel because you've seen the movie I suggest you change that. This novel is a masterpiece of the American paperback. It deserves an audience to appreciate it for its own merits. Bloch's use of character, violence, and raw human emotion gives this novel an edge that the film doesn't have. The American novel doesn't get much better than this.