While somewhat innovative in its portrayal of a serial killer as truly ill and depraved and not just a kind of spree criminal, for the most part Robert Bloch’s Psycho is a simple potboiler and murder mystery. The prose is unexceptional. Everything uniquely interesting about the criminal mind of Norman Bates is only revealed in its final pages. It’s easy to see why its concise, lurid plot and minimal locations and characters made it ideal for film director Alfred Hitchcock’s plan to make a shocking, low-budget thriller that he was going to produce independently. It was moderately successful, but far from a bestseller until after the film adaptation became a hit, making it feasible for Hitchcock to buy up copies to help keep its twist ending under wraps. The novel gleefully cheats in a way that would be impossible in a film, as conversations between Norman and his mother take place with no hint that the deranged Norman is in fact speaking for his dead mother too. Hitchcock’s version is surprisingly faithful to Bloch; the only major divergence was the decision to make Norman a slight and nervous young man who would be far more sympathetic to audiences than the pudgy, middle-aged character described in the novel, who might have been more accurately portrayed by someone like Ernest Borgnine or Rod Steiger than Anthony Perkins. The novel is a page-turner, but just as the Hitchcock masterpiece of a film caused the novel to become a top seller, the film tends to make the novel seem much better than it really is too.
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