Robert Bloch’s Psychos

The late, great Robert Bloch (author of Psycho) was a master of macabre humor: he was fond of clever, grisly one-liners, often used as twist endings. He also liked to write about psychotic and psychopathic killers. This solid anthology, put out by the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and completed after Bloch’s death, honors his legacy with 22 tales about murderers and crazies of various stripes. A good many of the stories, most memorably Esther Friesner’s “Lonelyhearts,” have Blochian twists at the end. The weakest of the bunch have no other flaw than predictability, and the strongest, such as Ed Gorman’s powerful “Out There in the Darkness” are classics of traditional storytelling. You’ll find excellent stories here by Denise M. Bruchman, Del Stone Jr., Edo van Belkom, Gary A. Braunbeck, and others. Stephen King contributes a little gem of a tale in which the narrator finds himself in an autopsy room: “It fits. It fits everything with a horrid prophylactic snugness. The dark. The rubbery smell…. Dear God, I’m in a body bag.”

Contents:

Autopsy Room Four by Stephen King
Haunted by Charles Grant
Out There in the Darkness by Ed Gorman
Please Help Me by Richard Christian Matheson
The Lesser of Two Evils by Denise Bruchman
Point of Intersection by Dominick Cancilla
Doctor, Lawyer, Kansas City Chief by Brent Monahan
Grandpa’s Head by Lawrence Watt-Evans
Lonelyhearts by Esther M. Freisner
Lighting the Corpses by Del Stone Jr.
Echoes by Cindie Geddes
Lifeline by Yvonne Navarro
Blameless by David Niall Wilson
Deep Down There by Clark Perry
Knacker Man by Richard Parks
So You Want to Be a Hitman by Gary Jonas
The Rug by Edo van Belkom
Interview with a Psycho by Billie Sue Mosiman
Icewall by William D. Gagliani
A Southern Night by Jane Yolen
The Forgiven by Stephen M. Rainey
Safe by Gary A. Braunbeck