Psycho is a novel by Robert Bloch.

Story

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The story is divided (here, not in the actual book) into several sections, by the character who is followed in that chapter.

Mary (chapters 1-4)

Psycho is a 1959 suspense novel by Robert Bloch, which describes the events surrounding the encounter of Mary Crane, a girl who, after years as a bank teller, turns to embezzlement, stealing $40,000 and leaving town.

On her way to her boyfriend/fiancee Sam's house, she is forced to stop at the dilapidated Bates Motel, on the side of the highway. The owner is Norman Bates, an overweight, middle-aged alcoholic whose pastime is chiropracticing. He is attracted to her, and offers to have dinner with her in his office, which is crowded with stuffed birds.

When he goes back to the house to make dinner, his mother gets angry at him. They make small talk (Bates isn't much good at that sort of thing), and he mentions that Mother wasn't happy about him "seeing" Mary. Norman admits that she is "ill", but when Marion suggest that she be "put somewhere", Norman bursts out into semihysterics, saying that he couldn't do that. He says that "A boy's best friend is his mother."

Afterwards, Mary readies herself for a shower (while Norman watches through a peephole).

Mary is in the shower; in comes Mrs. Bates with a butcher knife (this is the hallmark scene of Hitchcock's film), and (in the words of Bloch) "cuts off both her scream and her head."

Norman (chapter 5)

A brief scene back at the house: Mother is ranting at Norman that he's a nogoodnik, and he drinks in an attempt to drown her out. Bloch goes inside Norman's head for a minute, and gives us one of his trademark word-association tennis-matches, with phrases dancing through Norman's befuzzled brain, until he collapses on the floor, drunk off his feet.

Norman enters Mary's room after he comes to his senses, and, seeing the scene, cleans up after Mother. He pushes Mary's car (along with her, all her things, and the $40,000) into a nearby swamp.

Arbogast (chapters 6-10)

The bank owner gets suspicious, as does Mary's sister, Lila, when she is informed; she goes to find Sam, and they are joined by an insurance detective, Arbogast, who's investigating the $40,000 claim.

He goes out to look for Mary, and gets to the motel. After interviewing Norman, he is suspicious (especially when Norman won't let him see Mother) and calls Sam to tell him so, along with the fact that Mary was in Room #1 (which he deduces from Bates' uneasiness when asked about that room), and that he is going to talk to Mrs. Bates. He enters the house, and is met by Mother at the door--with a hatchet. After Norman cleans that up, he carries Mother into the fruit cellar despite her protests, telling her that it's "for her own good."

Sam & Lila (chapters 11-16)

Sam and Lila, en route to the motel, ask the local sheriff about Bates and his mysterious Mother, and find out that his mother committed suicide with her lover, Joe Considine, some years ago, and that it was very hard for Norman to handle; he had to be put away for a while, to keep him from doing something unreasonable.

They then go to the motel, and sneak into Mary's room. In the bathroom, they discover an earring of Marion's, with a chunk of the ear, near the shower. Bates is listening at the peephole, and hurries to get rid of them. While talking to Sam, Lila has gone up to the house. Bates knocks Sam cockeyed, and rushes up.

Lila goes up to Mrs. Bates' room, which is exactly as it was when she died. In Norman's room, she discovers several tomes on arcane and/or perverse subjects: P.D. Ouspensky's A New Model of the Universe, The Extension of Consciousness, Margaret Alice Murray's The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Dimension and Being; and translations of Joris-Karl Huysmans's Là Bas and the Marquis de Sade's Juliette.

She then goes into the fruit cellar, where she sees the back of what seems to be an old woman by the furnace; she calls to it: "Mrs. Bates? Mrs. Bates?", and touches its shoulder. It swings around, revealing the mummified Mrs. Bates. As she stares on in horror, a falsetto voice from behind her cries "I'm Norma Bates!" Turning, Lila sees a figure in a silk dress, with makeup clumsily splotched on the face, with hair askew. In the upraised hand of the attacker is yet another giant knife. But just as Lila is about to be split open like a rail, Sam throws himself on the figure. Its hair flies off--a wig--revealing Norman Bates!

Dr. Steiner (chapter 16)

Lila and Sam return, with Norma/n in tow, to the authorities, who dredge the swamp and lock Norman up. Suddenly, everyone in town is remembering incidents when they had "noticed something funny about the way he acted"; and others have "seen him around that motel of his", and had always "suspected" him. Norman is being accused of more phantastic horrors: cannibalism, Satanism, incest, and necrophilia (all of which are viable and in some cases, highly probable)

A psychologist, Dr. Nicholas Steiner, analyzes Norman and discovers that he has suffered childhood trauma which has made him become a transvestite. He also finds that Norman was rejected from the army, and his mother made him stay home, not allowing him to grow up.

Then Joe Considine shows up and begins to love up Norma, which makes Norman insanely jealous. After walking in on them "together", as polite society would have it, he poisoned them both with strychnine. Steiner explains lavishly how slow and painful strychnine poisoning can be, and how it must have affected Norman.

Norman also writes a suicide note in which Norma explains that she was pregnant and Joe was actually married to someone else on the other coast, in order to allay suspicion. But during the writing, he began to regret his actions--he wanted Mother back. So, as Dr. Steiner puts it,

"while writing the note, had changed. Apparently, now that it was all over, he couldn't stand the loss of his mother. He wanted her back. As he wrote the note in her handwriting, addressed to himself, he literally changed his mind. And Norman, or part of him, became his mother."

Everyone thinks it was a suicide pact, thanks to the note, and nobody sees exactly how far Norman's gone from reality since then. He dug up and mummified Mother, and began to pretend he was her, to bring her back to life. He wore her clothes, spoke in her voice, did everything as she did.

Dr. Steiner makes one final, ultimately shocking revalation: that Norman had become an "unholy trinity"; three personalities in conflict within his mind:

"There was Norman, the little boy who needed his mother and hated anything or anyone who came between him and her. Then Norma, the mother, who could not be allowed to die. The third aspect might be called Normal--the adult Norman Bates, who had to go through the daily routine of living, and conceal the existence of the other personalities from the world. Of course, the three weren't entirely distinct entities, and each contained elements of the other. Dr. Steiner called it an 'unholy trinity.'"

Steiner explains how Norman dealt with the real world after being released from the asylum; after feeling that preserving Mother in memory is insufficient, he digs her up and taxidermizes her. He cares for her as though she were alive, and Steiner compares the give-and-take between Norma and Norman to a ventriloquist and his dummy, with Normal mediating, pretending sanity. Steiner speculates on whether Normal may have been sucked into the act himself, through his interests in occultism and metaphysics.

He tells Lila and Sam that when trouble arose, Norma became dominant (with Normal drinking until he blacked out to cover for her), and she killed Mary. Since Bates is obviously insane--"psycho(tic)", in fact--there will be no trial, and he will be put into an asylum. Lila concludes sadly that "I can't even hate Bates for what he did. He must have suffered more than any of us. In a way I can almost understand. We're all not quite as sane as we pretend to be." And she goes off with Sam.

"And that was the end of it.

"Or almost the end."

Norma (chapter 17)

"The real end came quietly."

The story ends with Norma/n, sitting alone in the padded cell where s/he's been confined. She tells Norman that (this is the line from the film, so it isn't exactly right):

"It is sad when a mother has to speak the words that condemn her own son. I can't allow them to think I would commit murder. Put him away now as I should have years ago. He was always bad and in the end he intended to tell them I killed those girls and that man, as if I could do anything but just sit and stare like one of his stuffed birds. They know I can't move a finger and I want to just sit here and be quiet just in case they suspect me. They're probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. I'm not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching... they'll see. They'll see and they'll know, and they'll say, "Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly..."

Characters

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• Mary Crane - A bank teller who steals money in order to marry her boyfriend, Sam Loomis. She is the victim of "Mother." In the film versions she is renamed Marion Crane.
• Sam Loomis - Mary's boyfriend
• Lila Crane - Mary's sister
• Norman Bates - A motel owner who complains about his "mother"
• Norma Bates - Norman's "mother" who kills Mary Crane. It turns out that Norman "is" Norma in a strange way - After killing Norma, Norman missed Norma to the point where he began to dress and talk like Norma. This, in a way, "turned" him into Norma.

Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science

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The character of Norman Bates is widely believed to be based on the actual serial killer Ed Gein, who also inspired several other gruesome fictional characters. This could be based on the fact that Bloch was living within fifty miles of Gein when the news broke out.

Bloch always denied that, saying that he'd heard about Gein vaguely, and was interested in the idea of "a nice quiet boy" in a little town being a secret psycho. Others comment that Bloch most likely based the characters on Calvin Beck and his magna mater, a fellow science-fiction writer with a mother eerily similar to Norma Bates. Tom Weaver's essays, Norman, Is That You? and "Psycho"Genesis, go into this, explaining where Bloch's inspiration came from.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

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Bloch's novel was adapted into an acclaimed feature film in 1960 by Alfred Hitchcock, and a less successful remake in 1998 by Gus Van Sant. In the film, the protagonist was renamed "Marion Crane."

Bloch later wrote two sequels, Psycho II and Psycho House, which have no relation to the film's sequel Psycho II.

In an interview, Bloch also mentioned that someone had once proposed the concept of Psycho becoming a musical, on Broadway. To Bloch's disappointment, there didn't seem to be anyone willing to fund it, although he said that the score had already been set, and there were some great tunes to sing in the shower.

1956 novels | American novels | Thriller novels

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