An American novelist, short story writer, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, and journalist, Robert Bloch is respected for his contributions to the literary genres of horror fiction, crime fiction, and science fiction as well as to film, television, and radio. A prolific writer whose career spanned nearly sixty years, Bloch specialized in psychological horror. Claiming that he had no formal knowledge of psychology, he explored human psychopathology in novels, stories, and scripts that are noted for combining humor and social consciousness with archetypal scenes of terror. Bloch is best known as the author of Psycho, a novel published in 1959 that was turned into a classic movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock and prompted several sequels by other directors. The book and films feature Norman Bates, a schizophrenic killer with extremely strong Oedipal tendencies who preys on the visitors to his family's hotel; Bloch followed Psycho with two sequels, Psycho II and...