Psycho, A Review

Psycho

by Robert Bloch

---

" Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher's knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream. And her head." - Bloch

⭐⭐⭐⭐

---

It was strange reading this book. I knew the story very well. I've seen the film a thousand times, I've written essays on it, read essays on it, talked about it, seen every pastiche, every parody. Everyone knows Psycho. But Hitchcock, for all he's praised for the brutality and horror of his interpretation, didn't get close to the shock levels of Robert Bloch's original work. I could smell the misogyny from the first page. Norman Bates isn't a strangely innocent and kind of classically handsome Anthony Perkins, a guy who is "just shy" around women. Norman Bates is a balding, heavy guy (which isn't any less handsome than Perkins to be fair) who HATES women. The word bitch was thrown around more than even I could take. I could almost feel his saliva hit my face as he spat the word out.

The book plays out more like a classic detective novel, and I loved that. It made the chase seem more real and more tense. The film sort of missed that for me. It wasn't cat and mouse so much as cat and very terrifying man who will stab the cat to death and drown it in a swamp while wearing his mum's best wig. I even preferred the love affair that draws our main character out to the desolate roads more intriguing in the book than on the screen.

I related a lot more to the characters in the book too. Film tends to portray people as people, whereas books let me imagine them as whoever I want them to be. That makes it easier for me to engage with them and to picture them over and over again. No fault of Hitchcock or film in general of course, it's how my brain works.

I would say Psycho could be read by people who had seen the film, who haven't seen it yet, or who never want to see it. It's completely different in tone, although all the same plot points are there. The characters are different enough that you don't picture the main cast of the film. That's is impressive since they've been front and centre of horror culture since the 1960s.