His first thought is to have her put in jail, but then he cannot bear the thought of living without her, so decides to cover for her. Upon waking up, he discovers Mary’s body and suspects his mother to be the culprit. Prior to Mary’s murder, Norman had watched her through a peephole in his office as she was undressing. Just at that moment, an elderly woman enters Mary’s room while she is showering and decapitates her. Mary returns to her room and makes a decision to return the stolen money so as to avoid having to live with the guilt of stealing it. Norman reacts violently and insists that Norma is a normal person. Soon she realizes how abusive the relationship is between Norman and his mother and tries to get Norman to institutionalize her. Norman asks her to dinner at his house and she accepts the invitation. She is lost when she gets to the Bates Motel. Her plan is to meet her long-distance fiancé, Sam Loomis, pay off some debts he has, and get married. The patron wanting a room is Mary Crane, who, after stealing a large sum of money from her boss in the real estate business, has just driven through several states.
His thoughts return to the reality of the moment when someone arrives looking for a room in the motel. He fantasizes about killing her, thinking of how such an act would free for him. He quietly puts up with her abuse, which questions his social skills and his sexual interests. This escalates into a fight in which his mother emasculates him, calling him weak and afraid of her. A forty-year-old Norman is in his office reading matter his mother deems obscene and for which she chastises him as the novel opens.
There are intimations in the novel that there may be incest in their relationship. She prevents him from having a life that does not center around her and tells him that intercourse is a sin, and that, with the exception of herself, women are whores. His mother, Norma, has raised Norman alone since the death of her husband. The thriller, to which Bloch also wrote two sequels, tells the tale of Norman Bates and his troubled and troubling relationship with his mother at the rundown motel he operates in a desolate area. Although it might now be more familiar as a 1960 film by Alfred Hitchcock, featuring Janet Leigh’s fateful shower, Psycho began as a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch.
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