#robert bloch

“The old woman and the cat, they were both ageless, both evil”

Boris Dolgov (1910–1958), illustration to “Catnip” by Robert Bloch

from ‘Weird Tales’ Vol. 40 #3, March 1948

Full Quote:

In recent years Ted White, former editor of Amazing and Fantastic, expressed the belief that this sort of “sick” writing is the product of a “sick” mind—and suggested that anyone attracted to it is also “sick.”

The notion is interesting, but its revisionist attitude towards literature could have far-reaching implications. If safeguarding our mental health requires us to avoid the work of those whose lifestyles depart from the accepted norm, then our bookshelves would soon be stripped bare.

The literary efforts of chronic alcoholics, drug addicts, sexual deviants, and victims of psychosis with suicidal tendencies can indeed be dismissed, but we must be prepared to accept the consequences.

We will, of course, lose the efforts of Poe, Hawthorne, de Maupassant, and Kafka. But we will also be deprived of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, Remembrance of Things Past, and hundreds of other titles that some regard as literary masterpieces.

We must avoid O. Henry, Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, Virginia Woolf, Jack London, André Gide, Thomas Wolfe, Somerset Maugham, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, Christopher Isherwood, William Faulkner, and Oscar Wilde, to name only a few.

The same applies to such diverse talents as Dashiell Hammett, Nietzsche, Brendan Behan, Raymond Chandler, Schopenhauer, and Hans Christian Andersen.

Poets would vanish: Byron, Auden, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Swinburne, Verlaine, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman.

We would also cast into oblivion the plays of Marlowe, Genet, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Noël Coward—and, according to some authorities, the complete works of William Shakespeare.

It seems a high price to pay for our mental hygiene.

HP Lovecraft: what if you you saw a cosmic horror and it made you go crazy

August Derleth: what if you saw a cosmic horror and HP Lovecraft wrote it

Robert W Chambers: what if you saw a really off-putting shade of yellow

Stephen King: what if you saw a cosmic horror and it was a clown

Thomas Ligotti: what if you saw a cosmic horror and actually you were the clown all along

Frank Belknap Long: what if you saw a cosmic horror in the corner

Ruthanna Emrys: what if YOU were the cosmic horror

Theodore Sturgeon: what if you saw a cosmic horror and it was a teddy bear

Robert Bloch: what if you saw a cosmic horror and actually the real darkness was inside the human heart the whole time

Ramsey Campbell: what if a you saw a cosmic horror and it was english

Victor LaValle: what if you saw a cosmic horror and it was a metaphor for racism

Caitlin Kiernan: what if you saw a cosmic horror and racism was good actually

Nick Mamatas: what if Jack Kerouac saw a cosmic horror thats like telling gene krupa not to go boom boom bam boom boom bam bam boom boom bam boom

Brian Keene: we can't stop here this is cosmic horror country

Laird Barron: what if you saw a cosmic horror and you could punch it

Brian Lumley: what if you saw a cosmic horror and you could shoot it with a gun

Robert E Howard: what if you saw a cosmic horror but you despised sorcerers and all weavers of the black arts so you killed it and took its treasure (+10 gold coins, +12 experience points)

William Hope Hodgson: ohhhhh what if you saw a cosmic horror in a pineapple under the sea

Arthur Machen: what if you saw a cosmic horror that your nanny warned you about

Hailey Piper: what if you saw a cosmic horror and it was gay

Drew Huff: what if you saw a cosmic horror and it was a bimbo

Yeah so I finally came around to finishing this Norman drawing I had started more than a week ago.

I also did this extra one that is more cartoony (or chibi, whatever you wanna call it):

I gave him the black sweater the film version of Norman wears. Also, he's reading The Realm of the Incas, by Victor Wolfgang von Hagen; the book he's actually reading at the first chapter of the novel! I got really excited when I first began listening to the audiobook and I heard them reference an ancient culture from my contry. Anyways, I really liked the Psycho novel, and I liked this original version of Norman too, more than I expected. I still like Anthony Perkins' interpretation much better, but book Norman kinda feel like his own separate character (since he has some very different personality traits, aside from the appearance), and I appreciate him as he is.

A little treat this evening for you, folks. I’m always really put off by the comparisons of Norman Bates to Ed Gein - or more so, any overt suggestions that the character of Norman Bates and the entire plot of Psycho is ripped directly from the Ed Gein case. So let’s do a little digging for fun!

“But Mr Based!” I hear you cry, “the Wikipedia production segment for Psycho contradicts the first screenshot!”

Yeah, you’re right, it does. Sure, it says “loosely based”, but it’s giving a lot of wiggle room on what Bloch actually absorbed into his work. Let’s check out the sources on the production page for the film here.

So the sources are, some random click bait article that wants you to buy Amazon Prime and also has absolutely nothing of value to say on the topic, and this book that has only this statement:

Weird. And totally irrelevant.

The original source for the Bloch quote on the first screenshot that Wikipedia uses is this archived page, which itself claims it sources the quotations from Douglas Winter’s Faces of Fear 1985. This page more carefully suggests that Psycho was based only on the circumstances of the murders, not Gein himself as an individual.

If we pull up Faces of Fear, we can find this:

It seems I’ve ran out of links to add, but the book is readily available on the Internet Archive library. Unfortunately, this is the only paragraph in the book that mentions Ed Gein, and these quotes from the website, and which also appear on Wikipedia, aren’t present in the book at all.

So where the heck do they actually come from?

Well, it seems they come from Robert Bloch’s autobiography, Once Around the Bloch, 1993, which is also on the Internet Archive.

So what do I find?

And there you go! Norman Bates, at least Robert Bloch’s version of him, is not based on Ed Gein. The contextual influence of Gein’s crimes definitely contributed to the creation of the book, but all the coincidences that make the two topics seem so closely narratively intertwined are exactly that: Coincidences.