As a young writer, Bloch was a disciple and imitator of H.
During a sixty-year writing career that started when he was in his teens, Robert Bloch (1917-1994) produced numerous short stories, novels, and, in later years, screenplays and teleplays, in genres ranging from crime and horror to science fiction and fantasy, but his single greatest claim to fame is his 1959 novel, Psycho. As a young writer, Bloch was a disciple and imitator of H. P. Lovecraft and contributed many stories to Weird Tales and similar magazines, but as he matured he developed his own distinctive writing style. Psycho draws a few elements from real-life killer Ed Gein, who lived not far from Bloch’s own town in Wisconsin; Gein, like Bloch’s anti-hero Norman Bates, was a mother-fixated loner who managed to blend in with his small town for a number of years before his crimes were uncovered, though there are more differences than similarities between the two. Hitchcock was immediately attracted to the story, and he dealt with film studio executives’ aversion to the material by offering to reduce costs by filming it in black and white, using the crew of his Alfred Hitchcock Presents television show. After rejecting one screenplay, he hired Joseph Stefano, who produced the version that was filmed. In the novel, Norman Bates is an overweight alcoholic, but Hitchcock had decided to cast Anthony Perkins in the part, so Stefano made the character younger and cut out his drinking and his interest in spiritualism. The screenplay also focuses considerably more than the novel on the character of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), whose name was changed from Mary in the book because there was an actual Mary Crane in Phoenix. Norman Bates appears at the very beginning of the novel, and Mary is only in two out of seventeen chapters, while Marion is at the center of the action for much of the film’s first half. The movie’s famous shower scene received a lot of criticism in 1960 for its violence, but it must be pointed out that the same scene in the book is even more gruesome.