Steve-Calvert.co.uk
Steve-Calvert.co.uk
A Passion For Horror
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Psycho is not a long book. My copy contained just 153 pages and I must admit that, like a lot of people, I have already seen the film. Hitchcock's Psycho is a great film, but it does not allow you to get into the heads of the characters in the sane way that the book does and so I am very glad that I finally got around to reading Bloch's classic. I do wish that I had read the book first, though, because I would have enjoyed it all the more if I hadn't already known the truth about Norman's mother. But perhaps that would have spoilt my first enjoyment of the film and so it is a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other. Because I have already seen the film, I already carried a picture of Norman Bates in my head. Not surprisingly it looked a lot like Anthony Perkins. The original Norman, bound in paper and seventeen chapters long, actually looks nothing like Mr Perkins. He is fat and wears rimless spectacles and turns a lovely shade of red whenever he talks to girls. Norman likes reading. He reads a lot and it doesn't take many pages before the reader realizes that he is a very intelligent man, although his choice of reading matter might be considered a little strange at times. Norman is also, essentially a very lonely man whose life seems to have been overshadowed by his domineering mother, with whom he has quite a nasty argument within the first few pages of the book. Norman runs the Bates Motel and lives in the big, old house that stands behind it. The motel does not get much business because the highway has been moved and the new road carries away most of the potential customers. Norman is bitter about this because he had received advanced warning of the new highway and could have sold the motel at the time and made enough profit from the sale to build a new motel in a better location. His mother overruled him though, and he is now trapped in the same house he was born in forty years ago, with a business that is worth nothing. The only consolation for Norman is that he has plenty of time to read. When Mary Crane arrives at the motel she has forty thousand dollars of stolen money in her car. She has stolen the money from work and intends to use it to start a new life with. Mary might be a thief, but she has had a hard life and sacrificed a lot for her mother and her younger sister. Mary was just seventeen years old when her father was killed and she had to forgo college and take care of her ailing mother while also holding down a fulltime job. Mary was adamant though, that her sister, Lila, would not miss out the same way that she did and so she paid for Lila to go to college. Mary was in her mid-thirties when her mother died and her sister finally finished college and got herself a good job. By that time Mary felt that a lot of her life had passed her by. After their mother's death Lila had insisted that Mary take a holiday and so she did. She took a cruise and found a new chance for happiness in the form of Sam Loomis. Sam is a hard working man who owns a hardware store, but he is proud and refuses to marry Mary until he has paid off all of his many debts and can offer her a good life. Waiting has been hard for Mary, though, and so when her employer gives her such a lot of money to take to the bank on her way home, she forgets all about the bank and instead just goes home and packs her things, intending to use some of the money to pay off Sam's debts so that they can be married. Unfortunately for Mary she never gets farther than the Bates Motel. She is taking a shower when she turns to see the face of an old woman starring at her through the shower curtains. Mary screams, but her screams are soon silenced by the old woman's knife, which she later uses to cut off poor Mary's head. Obviously people come looking for Mary, not just Sam and Lila, but a private detective too and the local sheriff -- forty thousand dollars is a lot of money and it rightful owner wants it back. All avenues of investigation seem to lead to the Bates Motel, where there are more secrets than just that of what happened to Mary. The whole thing is very worrying for Norman, but he intends to keep all of his secrets, if he can only keep his mother under control for long enough. Psycho is a great book and I was surprised to find
that it is not particularly detailed in its descriptions of the acts of
murder. It tells you what happens but it doesn't dwell unnecessarily on
it: '.a hand appeared, holding a butcher's knife. It was a knife that,
a moment later, cut off her scream. And her head.' Okay, it doesn't
paint a pretty picture, but it manages to paint it without any red paint
at all, leaving the reader to imagine that for themselves instead. I was
expecting Psycho to be a book that used gallons of red paint. I
was wrong. No red paint needed and it is still a masterpiece of horror
fiction that any horror fan will probably enjoy, but that can
still be enjoyed by the more squeamish of readers as well. |
