"A Certain Slant of Light..."

I

Psycho, the novel by Robert Bloch, was one of the most disappointing reading experiences of my teenaged life.

This was doubly puzzling—first, because I already loved Bloch’s writing, having devoured numerous collections of his short stories and half a dozen of his other novels; second, because Psycho was already my all-time favorite film.

I’m not sure why—maybe the book had gone temporarily out of print?—but back then I had a hard time locating a copy of Psycho. The local library system didn’t have it. I couldn’t find it in the only new bookstore anywhere near my home. Our town’s thrift shops (which were the closest thing we had to used bookstores) never had it. For what seemed an endless time—it was probably six or eight months—I hungered desperately to read the original version of Norman Bates, Marion Crane, et al., as created by one of my favorite writers.

When on a family trip I finally did locate a used paperback (“An Award Novel,” it says on the cover—I still have the book—“The Hair-Raising Novel That Became Alfred Hitchcock’s Classic of Horror”), I felt an excitement I’ve rarely felt for any other book-find, before or since. It had a cover price of $1.25; I think I paid fifty cents for it. I would have happily paid ten times that.

I began reading immediately...And, as I say, suffered one of the biggest disappointments of my young life.

Psycho, the novel, proved to be a viscerally different—and for me far lesser—experience than the film. In startling contrast to Anthony Perkins’ portrayal of a young, shy, sensitive Norman Bates, Bloch’s Norman is a plump forty-year-old given to alcoholic blackouts (“Baby needs his bottle”) who thinks of women as “bitches.” He’s unpleasant, even repellent, and, unlike in the film, he’s the main character of the story from page one. Mary Crane (the film changed the name to “Marion”) isn’t introduced until Chapter 2, and her back story is disposed of in a few efficient pages as she’s arriving at the Bates Motel. As for the shower scene...Well, here it is as presented in the novel:

“...she didn’t hear the door open, or note the sound of footsteps. And at first, when the shower curtains parted, the steam obscured the face.
“Then she did see it there—just a face, peering through the curtains, hanging in midair like a mask. A head-scarf concealed the hair and the glassy eyes stared inhumanly, but it wasn’t a mask, it couldn’t be. The skin had been powdered dead-white and two hectic spots of rouge centered on the cheekbones. It wasn’t a mask. It was the face of a crazy old woman.
“Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.
“And her head.”

This was not what Alfred Hitchcock had presented to me as I sat, twelve years old, enraptured, watching Psycho for the first time on late-night television. The shower scene in the film overwhelmed me with its power, its terror, and, though I couldn’t have expressed it then, its strange beauty. The entire film did. Although I was already a big fan of Hitchcock thanks to his TV show and reruns of his earlier films (Lifeboat was a particular favorite), Psycho was perhaps the first truly great film experience of my life. Even at that age, I knew that the movie was far more than a “shocker”; I found myself moved nearly to tears by the end, overwhelmed by a sense of tragedy rarely matched by any film. Donald Spoto captures this well in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock:
“...for all its overt terror, repeated viewings leave one mostly with a profound sense of sadness. Psycho describes, as perhaps no other American film before or since, the inordinate expense of wasted lives in a world so comfortably familiar as to appear initially unthreatening: the world of office girls and lunchtime liaisons, of half-eaten cheese sandwiches, of motels just off the main road, of shy young men and maternal devotion. But these become the flimsiest veils for moral and psychic disarray of horrifying proportions.”

“Veils for moral and psychic disarray of horrifying proportions.” I don’t want to overanalyze this, but it seems to me that there are reasons that many children of trauma—and I was one—are attracted to horrific material such as, in my case, Psycho. I felt a strange kinship to the world of this film. It seemed familiar to me. I had adults in my life who were not what they seemed, who each had a veiled public face they showed the world—a pleasant, popular face—but quite another which each displayed to me, a face very much of “moral and psychic disarray,” at night, after the doors were locked. I knew very clearly how madness could lurk behind the walls and windows of ordinariness.

All this played in me—mostly but not completely unconsciously—when I first got to know the film. At the time I was limited, of course, to its sporadic appearances on TV. In those pre-VCR days there was a series of large-format books edited by one Richard Anobile which consisted of nothing but stills from a given classic film, with the dialogue printed beneath. In that way one could see at least a still photo from almost every shot of a movie, and follow the story—sort of a “graphic novel” version of the original. Needless to say, I quickly purchased the Anobile Psycho (mail-ordered direct from the publisher, whoever it was). And since I had a record of Bernard Herrmann’s complete music for the film, I could create a “virtual Psycho” by playing the record and following along in the photo book.

Maybe that helps clarify why Robert Bloch’s Psycho was such a devastating disappointment. Yes, the rudiments of the story were all there—obviously there would never have been a Hitchcock Psycho without a Bloch Psycho—but what I read as a teenager seemed to be Psycho stripped of all its meaning, its resonance, its subtleties and eerie echoes. Where Hitchcock was elegant, understated, Bloch was crude and obvious. Where Hitchcock made the viewer’s imagination do the work, Bloch spelled everything out. I remember thinking that, compared to the film, the novel seemed almost like a cartoon.

Critics, too, have routinely dismissed Bloch’s novel in considerations of the Hitchcock adaptation. The aforementioned Donald Spoto, in his fifteen-page analysis of the movie, offers Bloch exactly half a line, and that derogatory (“based on a little novel by Robert Bloch”). Other critics use similar language about the book—when they refer to it at all, which many don’t, except in passing. Aiding in this denigration of the novel was, for many years, Hitchcock’s screenwriter, the late Joseph Stefano, who claimed to have “hated” the book and, after a single reading, to have tossed it aside, never to look at it again while constructing his script. (Interesting, then, that so much of that script follows Bloch’s novel scene-for-scene.) Alfred Hitchcock claimed that Psycho “all came from Robert Bloch’s book” and that Stefano contributed “dialogue mostly, no ideas.” But for his part, Stefano happily allowed himself to be billed forever after, much to Bloch’s annoyance, as “the author of Psycho.”

So Hitchcock gave Bloch—and himself—all the credit, while Stefano gave himself—and Hitchcock—all the credit.

The truth, as it so often does, lies somewhere in between.

Stefano did make hugely important contributions to the film. He long claimed that the whole idea of focusing the first third of the story entirely on Marion, and not introducing Norman at all until very late, was his. It may have been so, though Hitchcock’s comments implicitly dispute this. What cannot be doubted, however, is that Hitchcock’s Psycho features some of the most brilliant dialogue ever heard in a motion picture—poetic, witty, multi-layered dialogue that’s vastly superior to what’s in the book. Norman’s gentle, exquisitely creepy speech to Marion about his mother’s apparent mental problems—“Understand, I don’t hate her. I hate what she’s become. I hate the illness” (a sentiment which had personal meaning to me in connection to my own mother)—is a masterpiece of sensitive understatement. It’s derived from a similar but much cruder speech in the novel, in which Norman screams, sweeps a cup off the table in rage, and goes on hysterically: “You don’t have to tell me about jealousy, possessiveness—I was worse than she could ever be. Ten times crazier, if that’s the word you want to use. They’d have locked me up in a minute if they knew the things I said and did, the way I carried on!” Etc.
And then there are the film’s classic one-liners, which have no equivalent in the novel:

Norman: “Mother—m-my mother...she—what is the phrase?—she isn’t quite herself today.”
Norman: “A boy’s best friend is his mother.”
Mother: “I will not hide in that dark, dank fruit cellar, no! You think I’m fruity, huh?”

How many “ideas” Stefano contributed to the movie will never be known, and it’s possible that Hitchcock’s disparaging remarks (recorded in the mid-1960s) may have been the result of his former screenwriter’s refusal to work on Hitchcock’s next project due to his commitments to his new television series, The Outer Limits. Certainly the comments seem more like a conscious insult aimed at Stefano than any particularly heartfelt praise of Bloch. (In fact, Hitchcock rejected the idea of working directly with Bloch a few years after Psycho, making the unflattering remark that Bloch had done too many films for schlockmeister William Castle.) In any event, whatever Stefano’s contributions, one thing was clear early on: Robert Bloch’s novel would receive little credit for the success of Hitchcock’s Psycho.

And nothing has changed since then. Many people have no idea that Psycho was ever a book at all. Bloch’s novel has remained in semi-obscurity, shuffling in and out of print and wandering between different publishers for the past several decades.

Well, one thing has changed. Much to my own surprise, in the past few years I’ve become a fan of Bloch’s novel.

It happened, I think, when I began teaching it (which I did only reluctantly, as a way of approaching the film). When I had to dig into the novel in detail, studying it with students page after page, week after week, I began to discover that it’s quite worthy in its own, very different way—a mid-century, pulp-fiction way. I use the phrase with no disrespect. Shorn of the legendary film surrounding it and taken on its own terms, Bloch’s Psycho emerges as a fine example of the mystery/thriller genre as it existed in the 1950s. The novel is not subtle, but it’s not meant to be. This is pulp entertainment in its purest form: simple language, lots of fast action, cliffhanger chapter endings. Norman is a grotesque character, but in a garishly fascinating way. Mother, meanwhile, lacking the sarcastic wit of her movie counterpart, emerges as a purely threatening figure. I love this scene between “them,” after Norman has taken her down to the fruit cellar.

“It’s like a prison cell, that’s what it is; you’re trying to make a prisoner out of me. You don’t love me anymore, Norman, you don’t love me or else you wouldn’t treat me this way.”
“If I didn’t love you, do you know where you’d be today?” He didn’t want to say it, but he had to. “The State Hospital for the Criminal Insane. That’s where you’d be.”
He snapped out the light, wondering if she’d heard him, wondering if his words had gotten through to her, even if she did.
Apparently she understood. Because just as he closed the door she answered. Her voice was deceptively soft in the darkness, but somehow the words cut into him; cut into him more deeply than the straight razor had cut into Mr. Arbogast’s throat.
“Yes, Norman, I suppose you’re right. That’s where I’d probably be. But I wouldn’t be there alone.”
Norman slammed the door, locked it, and turned away. He wasn’t quite sure, but as he ran up the cellar steps he thought he could still hear her chuckling gently in the dark.

Having re-read most of Bloch’s novels over the past few years, I’ve come to the conclusion that Psycho is probably the best of them, and certainly the strongest expression of the psychotic killer theme so common to his books. What it lacks in subtlety it makes up for in storytelling velocity. Its limitations as literature are counterbalanced by its sheer, entertaining readability.

The two Psychos make a perfect case study of the art of adaptation. Those who denigrate the novel and deem it essentially irrelevant to the success of the film (as Joseph Stefano all too often did) are just as wrong as that small band of devoted Bloch fans who claim that all Hitchcock did was film Bloch’s book more or less as written. It was unquestionably Bloch’s story. But the sensibility of the movie is completely alien to Bloch’s type of writing.

Actually, the slap Hitchcock aimed at Bloch—“too many pictures for William Castle”—is uncannily appropriate, for Bloch was actually a perfect William Castle writer. One need look no further than Castle’s 1964 film with Joan Crawford, Strait-Jacket, with a script by Bloch, to see the difference between Bloch and Hitchcock. Strait-Jacket is pure drive-in movie fun all the way. Lucy Harbin (Crawford) has spent twenty years in an asylum for murdering her husband and his mistress in a fit of rage—a crime witnessed by her daughter. Now, years later, the daughter is going to get married—but people start getting murdered around the old homestead again. The plot is absurd, the dialogue forgettable, the acting over-the-top—yet Strait-Jacket is a delight. The film is a perfect visualization of the ethos of that era’s pulp thrillers—silly and sensationalistic, yet thoroughly entertaining from first frame to last. It’s not deep and it’s not meaningful—it’s simply a well-designed vehicle to entertain its audience for an hour and a half, and it does so wonderfully. That’s Robert Bloch for you.

Psycho, the film, is a completely different kettle of fish—a masterpiece of filmmaking on all levels, a classic that, more than fifty years later, shows almost no signs of age. Like all great works of art, it seems to renew itself with each passing generation; kids still respond strongly to it, even though it’s just a creaky old black-and-white movie from, to their way of thinking, the dawn of time. The film has things to say about alienation, loneliness, terror, and death—or we can just say “moral and psychic disarray”—which are deeply personal to each viewer, many of whom, like me, have very intimate feelings about Psycho, feelings that aren’t necessarily easy to express. That’s what masterpieces do to a person. And that’s Alfred Hitchcock for you.

II

Over the twenty years following the release of Psycho, the film became a bona fide classic—the biggest moneymaker of Hitchcock’s career and one of the defining artistic works of its era. When the director died in 1980, he left behind a long list of classics—The Lodger, The Lady Vanishes, Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, many more—but he was unquestionably best known for that modestly-budgeted black-and-white thriller from 1960.

Though hardly on Hitchcock’s level, Robert Bloch’s career also flourished in this period. Inescapably tagged “the author of Psycho,” he wrote many novels, TV episodes, and B-movies. At some point in the early 1980s his agent pointed out to him that there was a great deal of money being made from Psycho merchandising—but that none of it was being made by Robert Bloch. Accordingly, the agent made a suggestion. “Write Psycho II,” he said.

While the title was intriguing to the author, he initially struggled to come up with an idea for the novel. “There was one thing I couldn’t visualize,” he said, “and that was a story to go with the title.”  In his autobiography Once Around the Bloch he reveals how his thinking began to evolve:

“What had old Norman been up to all this time? He’d be getting along in years now. Must be pretty damned dull for him, sitting there in that asylum; even duller if they’d gone ahead and cured him. Or thought they’d cured him. But suppose he wasn’t cured? And suppose he heard that somebody out in Hollywood intended to make a movie about him? What if he busted out and headed west?”

The novel would be released by Warner Books in September 1982. I have a vivid memory of standing in line at my local supermarket in Santa Barbara, California, my eyes practically popping out of my head upon espying Psycho II with its flashy 1980s-style stepback cover on the paperback racks next to the cash register. (“Bloch turns the shower on again—and your blood runs cold!”) This was surely the most visible novel of Bloch’s later career; I never saw any of his other books so prominently displayed anywhere. Of course I grabbed it, and of course I was reading it hungrily before I even left the store.

Psycho II begins promisingly. Bookish Norman Bates has become his asylum’s librarian, and he lives out his life quietly behind his desk in the library. Twenty years after the horrible events at the Bates Motel, he enjoys a life with “No restraint jacket, no padded cell, no sedation.” He is as free as a patient in a high-security mental institution can be. But one day two nuns come to visit the asylum and one of them, Sister Barbara, has a talk with Norman. She is sympathetic to him—“You’re not a monster, only a man”—and they are left briefly alone together. Suffice it to say that Norman is soon wearing a nun’s habit, and his career at the asylum ends—as his journey into 1980s America begins.

I was not the only one intrigued by the idea of a Psycho II. Bloch’s agent supplied Universal, the studio that owned the Hitchcock classic, the novel in manuscript, in the hopes of scaring up interest in adapting it to film. Unfortunately the studio “hated the book”—particularly, according to Bloch, its “depiction of filmmakers” when the story reaches Hollywood. Yet, while this is certainly possible, it seems unlikely that it was the defining reason that the studio passed on the novel—after all, Hollywood has often had great success depicting its own garish underside (Sunset Blvd., The Bad and the Beautiful, A Star is Born, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?). More likely is that the powers-that-be realized the novel was unfocused and had almost no sympathetic characters, while featuring a protagonist who is not what he appears to be—in a way that would have been virtually unfilmable.

However, while studio executives weren’t interested in Bloch’s book, the mere fact of its existence had alerted them to the possibilities of a movie of the same title. Psycho II, the film, was quickly put into production, directed by Australian filmmaker Richard Franklin with a script unrelated to the novel by Tom Holland, later known for Child’s Play and Fright Night. Ironically, Bloch was offered the chance to novelize the film script if he would abandon his own not-yet-published novel, an opportunity he understandably declined—and so when the film was released in June 1983 the public had two distinctly different Psycho IIs, released a mere nine months apart, to choose from.

In the film, Norman Bates (again played by Anthony Perkins) is released from the asylum and is allowed, however improbably, to return to his old stomping grounds—and virtually without supervision, other than an occasional casual visit from his psychiatrist. But within minutes of the doctor dropping him off at his old home, Norman is hearing Mother’s voice and finding notes from her. When he befriends an attractive young lady in town who calls herself Mary Samuels (Meg Tilly) the stage is set for more slice-and-dice shenanigans at the Bates Motel. (Bloch pointed out in interviews that this basic plot set-up bore a certain resemblance to his William Castle screenplay for Strait-Jacket.)

While both Psycho IIs open promisingly, each has a way of squandering its dramatic potential. Bloch’s novel gets lost in sermonizing about the sorry state of America and American filmmaking while diffusing the tension of the story through the use of too many different point of view characters, few of whom the reader cares much about. It’s difficult not to think that Bloch missed an obvious opportunity here—surely the Hollywood section would have been more compelling if it featured clear fictional stand-ins for Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Perkins, and the other key contributors to the original film. (Imagine how he might have skewered scriptwriter Joseph Stefano!) The film, meanwhile, degenerates into standard 1980s slasher-movie fare, with the kind of crude, splashy violence that Hitchcock himself would never have tolerated. Interestingly, both versions attempt what Hollywood used to call a “socko finish”—in each case, a big twist ending clearly designed to rival the original’s. Both fail, it must be said, rather miserably, since both manage in their different ways to be totally unbelievable.

In an interview promoting the movie, director Franklin said, “I think that anybody who looks at our film objectively will not be disappointed. I think that our film evokes what we remember of the original, but, most important, it is a film in its own right. What I hope will happen,” he added with bracing immodesty, “is that the two films will merge and become one larger film.”  That never happened, of course. In fact, the expanded “film” Franklin envisaged wasn’t even finished yet—two additional movies about Norman Bates would appear soon enough.

In the same period, 1983, Bloch answered a letter from a youngish fan—me—in which I asked about the future of his most famous creation. He responded, “Rest assured—there will be no Psycho III or IV from me. I said what I had to say, and that’s it.” But time would prove the author wrong.

III

Psycho III was the direct result of the relative success of Richard Franklin’s film, but neither he nor writer Tom Holland would have any involvement with the new project. Instead Universal commissioned a script from Charles Edward Pogue, who had recently written scripts for two Sherlock Holmes films made in England and was working on the script for the remake of The Fly. Anthony Perkins, flexing his fame muscles in a way he could not do with any character but Norman Bates, took over as director. The film would be released in 1986.

In a move possibly derived from Bloch’s Psycho II, Pogue’s script for the third film focuses on Norman’s relationship with a nun—though Sister Maureen (Diana Scarwid) is no Sister Barbara. At the beginning of the film Sister Maureen, in a sequence which carries strong if curiously irrelevant echoes of Vertigo, accidentally causes the death of another nun who falls from a church bell tower. From there she decides to leave the church and, in another echo—probably unconscious—from Bloch’s sequel, takes off on a joyless road trip which ends in mayhem and death; but instead of running from the Bates Motel, as Norman does in the book, Sister Maureen runs toward it, albeit unknowingly. When she attempts suicide in Room 1, where Marion Crane met her brutal end in the original film, and is saved by Norman, a kind of near-romance between the two troubled souls begins to blossom (itself reminiscent of Norman’s relationship with the Mary Samuels character in the previous movie).

As with the previous sequels, Psycho III at first seems promising. The idea of Norman Bates building a relationship with a failed nun in “moral and psychic disarray” is powerful, and some of the scenes between Perkins and Scarwid are dramatically effective. But the film, which screenwriter Pogue thought of as a “black comedy,” degenerates as surely as did the previous cinematic sequel into standard slasher-movie territory due to “the studio’s insistence on blood and guts.” One idea that Perkins and Pogue promoted was to use subtle visuals, including shooting this new film in black-and-white to mirror the original, but the studio wouldn’t hear of it. Psycho III wound up both splashily colorful and the most graphically violent of all the Psycho movies, though little of the gore serves any clear dramatic purpose. In perhaps the most egregious moment, Perkins (no doubt reluctantly) seems to pick up on a joke Hitchcock once told regarding his own film’s most famous scene. Referring to reports that after watching Psycho some moviegoers were so upset that they stopped taking showers, Hitchcock quipped, “Thank heavens I didn’t have my heroine killed while on the toilet.” Thus it is in Psycho III that viewers are treated to a character who is killed while on the, of course, toilet. Psycho III also features yet another attempt at a big twist ending—except that in this case the ending totally contradicts the big twist from Psycho II, rendering much of that film moot. Still, for all the studio interference, Anthony Perkins took the blame for the movie’s commercial failure, saying, “It’s my fault. I exuded such an air of confidence and articulateness and enthusiasm and appropriateness for this job that they thought I was doing it right.”

Bloch, aware of yet more Psycho film action making money for other people, decided to go to the Bates well one last time after all—but he believed that “it was now advisable to cut loose from Norman Bates” for good. In Psycho House, published in 1990, Norman is dead. The house and motel have become tourist attractions, recreating the real-life scenes of horror for fun and profit. But before the attraction even opens, bodies rather drearily begin piling up, and true-crime writer Amy Haines has to try to find the killer. (Interestingly, Charles Edward Pogue created a vaguely similar outline for a version of Psycho IV that was never filmed.) By this time, however, Bloch’s health was beginning to fail, and Psycho House shows signs of creative exhaustion. Its characters are uninteresting and the story has little connection to Psycho other than its setting. Psycho House proved to be Robert Bloch’s last novel.

IV

With Psycho III a box-office dud, it might have seemed that the cinematic adventures of Norman Bates had finally lurched to a close. But in 1990, the same year as Bloch’s final Psycho book, a modest made-for-cable movie appeared with the unpromising title Psycho IV: The Beginning. The failure of the previous installment of the franchise led Universal to refuse Anthony Perkins the director’s chair this time; instead writer/director Mick Garris, already with some experience with film sequels (The Fly II, Critters 2) was handed the reins. Parts of the original Bernard Herrmann music score would be used in this fourth effort, and most intriguingly, the script would be by none other than original Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano. The distinguished names, however, did little toward creating a distinguished film.

Eschewing any apparent continuity with the previous sequels, Psycho IV: The Beginning centers around a newly rehabilitated Norman who lives in a quite luxurious house with his wife Connie, a psychiatrist who treated him at the asylum (!). Stefano pictured this Norman as “not fresh out of an institution but one who had changed, married,” and “was on his way to recovery.” One night while waiting for Connie to come home from work Norman makes the unlikely choice to call in to a radio talk show on which the topic is “boys who murder their mothers.” As he tells his story to the on-air host, Fran Ambrose (C.C.H. Pounder), we are offered a series of flashbacks depicting Norman’s early life with Mother. Unfortunately these scenes, with Henry Thomas of E.T. as Norman and the respected British actress Olivia Hussey as Mother, have little convincing connection to what we know of Norman’s childhood from the original film. The fiercely strait-laced, almost Victorian Mrs. Bates has been replaced by a voluptuous woman of maniacally overripe passions who is constantly pulling her son into quasi-sexual embraces. The entire atmosphere of these scenes is hot, humid, oversexed—far more A Streetcar Named Desire than Psycho. This is a pity, since the radio call-in scenes between Norman and Fran Ambrose are actually quite successful. A powerful “two-hander” might have been made from this material, but every time Garris goes to the flashbacks, the film dies. As one critic of the time put it, “Hitchcock this most certainly ain’t.”

The sequels to Psycho—two novels, three films—all suffer from basic weaknesses, and whatever their entertainment value, not one of them feels anything like essential. Bloch’s novels are fundamentally flawed by the author’s apparent lack of interest in developing the Norman Bates character—Norman (despite initial appearances) has only a small role in Psycho II and isn’t even alive for Psycho House. The films, in contrast, put Norman front and center, but each one is so different in visual style and storytelling strategy from the others that they cannot be said to make up a cohesive or even coherent series. They are all too obviously the work of different filmmakers, with different ideas and agendas.

Yet Norman Bates continues to shadow my life, just as he has since I was twelve and first stayed up late to watch Psycho on TV. My first published novel, Midnight on Mourn Street (2008), contains echoes of the first two films—some conscious, others which I became aware of only years afterward. My later Savaging the Dark (2014) is the story of a schoolteacher, a kind of demented mother-substitute for a young boy who suffers devastating emotional abuse at her hands. Bates family territory indeed. If there had been a film adaptation, Olivia Hussey might have been quite good in it.

Now closing in on age 60, I find that Norman is never far from me. Often when I think of my own mother, dead these past forty years, I remember Norman’s words from the first film—“I don’t hate her. I hate what she’s become. I hate the illness.” I still re-encounter Norman Bates in teaching the novel and movie each semester, and I’m delighted when students decide that Bloch and Hitchcock are still relevant, still “cool.” Meanwhile further interpretations of Norman Bates have continued to appear—a remake of the original film, a graphic novel, a television pilot, a highly successful cable series, an authorized prose sequel by horror novelist Chet Williamson. And so Norman Bates never really fades away. Through his various versions he remains perpetually near, a kind of secret other self, whispering of the darkness within all of us.

Christopher Conlon won the Bram Stoker Award for editing He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson. His A Matrix of Angels was hailed by Booklist as “the most wrenching serial-killer novel of the past decade,” while Paste Magazine included Savaging the Dark on its list of the 50 Best Horror Books of All Time. He lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.