Robert Bloch

Robert Bloch — Robert Albert Bloch — American writer of psychological horror, crime, and fantasy whose novel Psycho gave Alfred Hitchcock one of cinema's most durable nightmares, died of cancer in Los Angeles on September 23, 1994. He was seventy-seven. Born April 5, 1917, in Chicago, he grew up reading Weird Tales, corresponded with H. P. Lovecraft as a teenager, and turned early pulp apprenticeship into a sixty-year professional career across magazines, radio, television, and film. Psycho (1959) was only one shelf in a large library: short stories such as "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper," scripts for Thriller and Star Trek, and novels that preferred twisted motive to cheap gore. He treated horror as a study of ordinary rooms and ordinary people — the motel desk, the quiet neighbor, the joke that lands a second too late. Friends in Los Angeles remembered a wry craftsman who showed up for writers' guild work and still answered fan mail about Bates Motel stationery. Southern California was his long professional home after Midwest beginnings. He died after a period of illness, leaving shelves that still move between mystery and dark comedy without apology. He died in Los Angeles on September 23, 1994. Film students still meet Norman Bates before they meet the novelist who invented him on the page. Bloch's gift was intimate dread — proving that the scariest American stories often start next door. Notice Nearby keeps the death date so September 23 remembers the Chicago pulp graduate who wrote Psycho and kept turning ordinary speech into suspense.