It was a dark and stormy night when Mary Crane glimpsed the unlit neon sign announcing the vacancy at the Bates Motel. Exhausted, lost, and at the end of her rope, she was eager for a hot shower and a bed for the night. Her room was musty, but clean, and the manager seemed nice, if a little odd.

This classic horror novel, which inspired the famous film by Alfred Hitchcock, has been thrilling people for fifty years. It introduced one of the most unexpectedly-twisted villains of all time in Norman Bates, the reserved motel manager with a mother complex, and has been called the “first psychoanalytic thriller.”

ROBERT BLOCH (1917–1994) began writing short fiction in the 1930s and published his first short novel, The Scarf, in 1947. In 1959, the year Psycho was published, Bloch won the Hugo Award and began to write for television and film as well. His autobiography, Once around the Bloch, was his last major work.