Psycho Century

Robert Bloch, American Horror Master

Bill Gillard

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496864352
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Robert Bloch (1917–1994) will forever be remembered as the author of Psycho—the novel that inspired one of the most influential horror films of the twentieth century—but his legacy extends far beyond that singular work. A master of imagination and craft, Bloch was one of the century's most versatile and groundbreaking literary voices, admired for his wit, warmth, and innovation. His influence can be traced through the works of Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, Ramsey Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke, and many others.

Spanning six decades, from the depths of the Great Depression to the dawn of the digital age, Bloch's career produced an astonishing range of work: hundreds of short stories, novels, teleplays, screenplays, and essays across genres as varied as horror, mystery, crime, thriller, and science fiction. His versatility positioned him as a central figure in shaping modern popular fiction. To understand the arc of American genre writing in the twentieth century, one must understand Robert Bloch.

Psycho Century: Robert Bloch, American Horror Master is the first full literary biography of this immensely influential author. It situates Bloch within the larger landscape of twentieth-century horror and suspense while tracing how he continually reinvented his stories for new audiences in television and film. Through these transformations, the book reveals Bloch's evolving literary sensibilities—ones that both reflected and shaped the shifting tastes of his era. At once a biography and a cultural history, the volume offers a vivid portrait of a writer whose work defined and redefined American genre fiction.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Bloch’s Origin Story: Cosmic Horror and Weird Tales
• Inside Our Own Skulls: Bloch’s Slow Transition to Psychological Horror
• Recognizable Human Monsters: Precursors to Psycho
• The Real Lurking Horrors, or, How Psycho Changed Everything
• After Psycho: Bloch’s Early 1960s
• Hollywood and Beyond: Three Films of the 1960s
• “No illusion. Jackson is dead”: Two Scripts for Star Trek
• Burgess Meredith Really Is the Devil: Torture Garden
• A Pretty Path Ending in a Bear Trap: The House That Dripped Blood
• Nothing to Lose but Your Mind: Asylum and Night-World
• Who I Am, How I Am, or What I Am: American Gothic and Low-Budget TV
• Unspeakable Revisions: Lovecraft at the End of Time
• Famous Crimes: Jack the Ripper
• The Final Exorcism: The Apotheosis of Norman Bates
• Conclusion: The Gentlest Creature on the Planet
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author