Psycho

Never having seen Hitchcock's screenplay of Psycho before, I had no idea of what to expect from the story. In fact, I was reading under the assumption that the book was actually written from the film--Hitchcock's quote on the back cover of the novel finally clued me in. I had always thought that the shower scene was the climax to the movie, but after reading it at the end of chapter three, I knew whatever impressions I had thought I had about the story were probably false.

What first caught my attention about the book was the quality of the writing--I was truly very impressed with the way Block put his words together in order to portray his ideas. He was also very descriptive; words were chosen carefully according to their connotations and meanings. All of these things tossed together made Psycho a very hard book to put down.

As far as the story itself went, I enjoyed it thoroughly. What interested me the most was how Bloch would tell one scene from one point of view, and in the following chapter, tell the same scene again from a different perspective. I think I was most impressed with this in chapters three and four, when Mary Crane is murdered. Chapter four was especially interesting because of how it delved into Norman's psychosis. Since I have never seen the movie, I am a little at a loss of how Hitchcock showed the extent of Norman's psychosis--in fact, I can't think of a single way a director could show that in a film. It seemed to me that Bloch just did too good of a job in creating the character of Norman Bates, and I'm not sure a director could do him justice.