Psycho, by Robert Bloch

Well, that escalated quickly.

I’m still digesting the book, and the prudent thing to do is to wait a day or so before doing this, but I’ve never been a very prudent person (I’m pursuing an MFA in Popular Fiction forchrissakes!). So here goes…

Reading Psycho after knowing the big twist was actually fun from an analytical point of view. From the first few pages when we meet Mrs. Bates, I could identify some of the techniques Bloch used to present Norma Bates as a living person without hinting that she’s really dead. In that first scene, we see that Norman doesn’t look at or touch his mother. She’s there, in the peripherals, berating him over his choice of reading materials and terminal bachelorhood. She never comes around to talk to him face on, and he even mentions that he wants to ignore her as if she weren’t actually there. What’s fun, is that in those early pages we not only meet Norman Bates, but also see Norma Bates as if she’s a real, living person to us as much as she is to him.

There are other instances throughout the book that also work, such as when he sees her after waking from one of his fugue states. He sees her as a waking-dream, leading the reader into believing she’s actually present. It’s pretty brilliant. The first 50 pages was a blast to read and dissect, even if I knew what was coming.

And then things escalated. And not in a good way. By escalate I mean spiraled into a clunky narrative of one-dimensional characters, unbelievable plot points and haphazard mechanics . But, before I get into all of the bad, I want to point out something great about Bloch’s writing: It’s as easily digestible today as it was nearly 60 years ago when he wrote this book. For the most part, the language he used and the dialogue from the characters is rarely dated. Unlike Richard Matheson, Bloch didn’t use wide brush strokes, but rather pointed, acute writing that may very well be found in novels written this decade. Of course, it wasn’t without exception, but even those were rare moments that usually focused around the technology of the time.

Maybe it’s that time that led us to the biggest plot hole: why were the police never called? The thin reasoning that the company wanted to save embarrassment for both Mary Crane and the Lowery firm didn’t make sense to me. Maybe it was different back then, but I would still think that a $40,000 theft and a missing girl would garner some sort of police response. It’s that sort of slipshod reasoning that made me roll my eyes more than once. I can’t really nit-pick Lila Crane’s motives because this was written in the 50s, but her constant dependence on the men in the book made me squirm. There was never any chance she could save her sister, but the book would have only been a hundred pages long if she would have gone to the police when she wanted to.

And let’s face it, we wouldn’t have lost much if that happened. The first fifty pages were the strongest of the book, and the 150 that followed did little to advance Norman’s story-line. The eventual discovery of his multiple personalities was delivered in a clinical rundown from a character that probably should have died in the hotel office, but for some reason Bloch spared him. I could see this book ending with Lila making a visit to the State Hospital and talking to the psychiatrist herself (that would help her character arc as a near-helpless woman to somebody who takes control of the situation and her life. Instead she leaves it all in the hands of the man that made the whole ordeal stretch out a week or more longer than it needed to.

Anyway, I’d talk about the climax, but there wasn’t one. Because, once again, the guy who probably should have died shows up in the nick of time and has the easiest save of any hero I’ve ever seen or read.

Even with all the negative things I’ve written about, the pace and brevity of the book made it a decent read, one that can be done on a lazy morning while sipping coffee (and that’s just how I read it).