Books With Flair

Recently released from a mental institution, Norman Bates celebrates his freedom by murdering a nun and then heads for Hollywood where he plans bloody revenge on those who are acting out his story. Reprint.

Marion is lost on a dark and lonely road; she's tired and hungry and afraid. She thinks she's dreaming when she sees a motel sign shining in the darkness: Bates Motel. But for Marion the nightmare is just beginning ... To most people Psycho needs no introduction, but although Alfred Hitchcock's film was largely faithful to the book, in the novel itself you will find a story more nuanced and - if possible - even darker.

An examination of the groundbreaking 1960 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, including the story's origins in real-life graverobber Ed Gein. The book presents material from the script and how it was adapted from Robert Bloch's novel; details of the film's production, particularly the shower scene and other technical difficulties; actors and the challenges of their roles; extended literary analysis of the film covering such devices as irony, symbol, theme, motif and foil; and the film's effect on audiences. Features 16 photographs, notes, bibliography and index.

A visionary book in the repertoire of prison literature. This is a 37 year old man's account of 25 years behind bars.

“Horror author Chet Williamson ably succeeds in the tough task of creating a sequel to Robert Bloch’s masterpiece, Psycho; a prequel to the less effective Psycho II; and a solid story in its own right...The novel shines. Whenever Norman gets the spotlight, the novel feels like a lost Bloch work.” —Publishers Weekly The original Psycho novel by Robert Bloch was published in 1959 and became an instant hit, leading to the smash movie only a year later, which brought Norman Bates's terrifying story into the public consciousness, where it still remains (proven by the success of the tv series, Bates Motel). It took Bloch 23 years to write another Psycho novel, revealing that Norman had been in a mental institution the entire time. In that sequel, Norman quickly escapes the sanitarium and goes on a killing spree in Hollywood. But what happened in that asylum during those two decades? Until now, no one has known. It's 1960. Norman Bates is in the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and it's up to Dr. Felix Reed to bring him out of his catatonic state. But Norman and Dr. Reed have obstacles in twisted fellow patients and staff members who think of the institution as a prison rather than a place of healing. And the greatest obstacle is the building itself, once a private sanitarium, rumored to be haunted. A wild card appears in the persona of Robert Newman, Norman's twin brother, taken away at birth after the attending doctor pronounced him brain damaged. As Robert and Norman grow to know each other, Norman senses a darkness in Robert, even deeper than that which has lurked in Norman himself. Soon, murders begin to occur and a shocking chain of events plunge us even deeper into the deranged madness inside the walls of Psycho: Sanitarium.

"With this book, Philip Skerry makes an ambitious and largely successful effort to restore perspective to the debate that has swirled around Psycho since Hitchcock first ripped back the shower curtain of our expectations in 1960 and plunged his knife into the collective cinematic consciousness." - John Baxter, Film International Psycho in the Shower is a multi-dimensional study of Psycho's astonishing shower scene. Philip J. Skerry shows how it may be the most significant and influential film scene of all and substantiates this claim by providing chapters on the evolution of the scene in Hitchcock's career, with particular focus on his methods for creating suspense and terror in the audience. In tracing the evolution of the shower scene, the author discusses and analyzes many films (both Hitchcockian and otherwise) that lead up to Psycho. The book places the shower scene in the cultural and social contexts of American popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s, arguing that it helped to create a revolution in both sensibility and cinematic style. Several unique dimensions help to set this study apart from other books on Psycho and Hitchcock: extensive and detailed interviews with people who worked on the film, including star Janet Leigh and screenwriter Joseph Stefano (the last significant interviews before their deaths); a close study of Hitchcock's employment of mise en scene and montage in the scenes leading up to the famous shower murder; a shot by shot analysis of the scene itself and a discussion of the numerous controversies surrounding it; and a provocative and insightful account of the writing of the book itself, which provides a unique look at the author's creative process. The book culminates with examples of how the shower scene has become embedded in the matrix of contemporary culture and the remarkable ways in which the scene affected people on first viewing.

?The Psycho Records follows the influence of the primal shower scene within subsequent slasher and splatter films. American soldiers returning from World War II were called "psychos" if they exhibited mental illness. Robert Bloch and Alfred Hitchcock turned the term into a catch-all phrase for a range of psychotic and psychopathic symptoms or dispositions. They transferred a war disorder to the American heartland. Drawing on his experience with German film, Hitchcock packed inside his shower stall the essence of schauer, the German cognate meaning "horror." Later serial horror film production has post-traumatically flashed back to Hitchcock's shower scene. In the end, though, this book argues the effect is therapeutically finite. This extensive case study summons the genealogical readings of philosopher and psychoanalyst Laurence Rickels. The book opens not with another reading of Hitchcock's 1960 film but with an evaluation of various updates to vampirism over the years. It concludes with a close look at the rise of demonic and infernal tendencies in horror movies since the 1990s and the problem of the psycho as our most uncanny double in close quarters.

The Bates motel once again becomes the setting for murder, and investigative reporter Amelia Haines discovers that catching a killer can become a dangerous game as her best informants keep turning up dead. Reprint.

This final volume includes "Confusion of Tongues Between Children and Adults" in which Ferenczi formulates his controversal ideas on childhood sexuality, and the conflict between the languages of tenderness and passion. First published in 1955, this book contains papers written by Ferenczi during his last years and some of his unpublished notes. It demonstrates Ferenczi's combination of great clinical understanding and an almost uncanny insight into unconscious process. Among the forty important items included are papers on the following: "Freud's Influence on Medicine", "Laughter", "Epileptic Fits", "Dirigible Dreams", "Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis", "Paranoia", "The Interpretation of Tunes Which Come into One's Head" and "The Genesis of Jus Primae Noctis".