Psycho

It was a dark and stormy night when Mary Crane glimpsed the unlit neon sign announcing the vacancy at the Bates Motel. Exhausted, lost, and at the end of her rope, she was eager for a hot shower and a bed for the night. Her room was musty, but clean, and the manager seemed nice, if a little odd.

This classic horror novel, which inspired the famous film by Alfred Hitchcock, has been thrilling people for fifty years. It introduced one of the most unexpectedly-twisted villains of all time in Norman Bates, the reserved motel manager with a mother complex, and has been called the “first psychoanalytic thriller.”

New York Times Book Review

Icily terrifying.

Robert Bloch(1917-1994) is the author of the classic horror novel, Psycho, which served as the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's thrilling film of the same name. At the urging of H. P. Lovecraft, Bloch began writing short fiction in the 1930s; his first short novel, The Scarf, was published in 1947. In 1959, the year Psycho was published, Bloch won the Hugo Award for a short story and began to write for television and film, starting with "Alfred Hitchcock Presents"-a job he earned before the film version of Psycho had completed shooting!