"The foulness was sucking against his throat, it was kissing his lips and if he opened his mouth he knew he'd swallow it, but he had to open it to scream, and he was screaming. 'Mother, Mother - save me!'"
Robert Bloch began his writing career as one of H.P. Lovecraft's proteges. Over the course of his career he'd movie from Lovecraft's brand of cosmic horror to stories more grounded in the world around him. Many of his stories have been adapted into movies and TV shows.
I'm going to go ahead and assume we've all seen Alfred Hitchcock's version of this story, and that no spoilers are possible. The Bates Motel, Norman Bates and his mother, the murder in the shower and the revelation that Norman isn't one personality but two - all of these elements are present in both the book and the movie. The only real difference is that in the book Norman's an obese man, whereas the actor who played him in the movie (Anthony Perkins) was quite slim.
If you've seen the movie there's not much reason to read this book, aside from the fact that's it's a very professionally written piece of fiction that works as well today as when it was first published. It seems simple, but as anyone who's tried to write a short story knows, it's never easy to write something this straightforward, and this concise. Psycho tells neither more nor less than it has to, it's impeccably paced, and the inevitable conclusion, when it inevitably arrives, is no less gripping for having been introduced beforehand.
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