Publication Order of Psycho Books
| Psycho | 1959 |
| Psycho II | 1982 |
| Psycho House | 1990 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Scarf | 1947 |
| Spiderweb | 1954 |
| The Kidnaper / The Kidnapper | 1954 |
| The Will to Kill | 1954 |
| Shooting Star | 1958 |
| This Crowded Earth | 1958 |
| The Dead Beat | 1960 |
| Firebug | 1961 |
| The Couch | 1962 |
| Terror | 1962 |
| Ladies’ Day | 1968 |
| The Star Stalker | 1968 |
| The Todd Dossier | 1969 |
| Sneak Preview | 1971 |
| It’s All in Your Mind | 1971 |
| Night-World | 1972 |
| American Gothic | 1974 |
| Strange Eons | 1978 |
| There Is a Serpent in Eden / The Cunning | 1979 |
| Twilight Zone: The Movie | 1983 |
| Night of the Ripper | 1984 |
| Lori | 1989 |
| The Jekyll Legacy (With: Andre Norton) | 1990 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| The Opener of the Way | 1945 |
| Sea Kissed | 1945 |
| Terror in the Night | 1958 |
| Pleasant Dreams: Nightmares | 1960 |
| Blood Runs Cold | 1961 |
| Atoms and Evil | 1962 |
| Bogey Men | 1963 |
| The Skull of the Marquis de Sade and Other Stories | 1965 |
| Tales in a Jugular Vein | 1965 |
| Chamber of Horrors | 1966 |
| The Living Demons | 1967 |
| Dragons and Nightmares | 1968 |
| Bloch and Bradbury / Fever Dream and Other Fantasies (With: Ray Bradbury) | 1969 |
| Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow | 1971 |
| The King of Terrors | 1977 |
| The Best of Robert Bloch | 1977 |
| Cold Chills | 1977 |
| Out of the Mouths of Graves | 1978 |
| Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of | 1979 |
| Mysteries of the Worm | 1981 |
| Midnight Pleasures | 1987 |
| Lost in Time and Space with Lefty Feep | 1987 |
| The Selected Stories of Robert Bloch, Volume 1: Final Reckonings | 1987 |
| The Selected Stories of Robert Bloch, Volume 2: Bitter Ends | 1987 |
| The Selected Stories of Robert Bloch, Volume 3: Last Rites | 1987 |
| Fear and Trembling | 1989 |
| Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies | 1998 |
| The Lost Bloch, Volume 1: The Devil with You! | 1999 |
| The Lost Bloch, Volume 2: Hell on Earth | 2000 |
| The Lost Bloch, Volume 3: Crimes and Punishments | 2002 |
| The Reader’s Bloch, Volume 1: The Fear Planet and Other Unusual Destinations | 2005 |
| The Reader’s Bloch, Volume 2: Skeleton in the Closet and Other Stories | 2008 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| The Eighth Stage of Fandom | 1962 |
| Out of My Head | 1986 |
| Once Around the Bloch: An Unauthorized Autobiography | 1993 |
About Robert Bloch
Robert Bloch (1917 to 1994) was an American writer of crime, horror and fantasy fiction, best known for the novel “Psycho” (1959), the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film. In a career of sixty years he wrote more than thirty novels and hundreds of short stories, along with scripts for film and television.
Robert Albert Bloch was born in Chicago on 5 April 1917 and moved with his family to Milwaukee in 1929. A reader of the pulp magazine Weird Tales from the age of ten, he became a protégé of H. P. Lovecraft, who was the first to encourage his writing seriously, and he began selling stories professionally at seventeen, straight after high school. His early work imitated Lovecraft’s cosmic horror. He later moved towards crime and psychological horror, while working for eleven years at a Milwaukee advertising agency.
His first published novel, “The Scarf”, appeared in 1947, and three paperback novels followed in 1954. In 1959 he won the Hugo Award for the short story “That Hell-Bound Train” and published “Psycho”, in which Norman Bates, a lonely motel keeper dominated by his mother, is drawn into a series of murders after a young woman on the run checks in. Bates was loosely based on the Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein. Bloch sold the screen rights for 9,500 dollars and received no further direct payment from the film.
Bloch then worked extensively in Hollywood, where his credits included the “Star Trek” episode “Wolf in the Fold”, one of several returns to Jack the Ripper, a subject he also treated in the novel “Night of the Ripper” (1984). Other novels include “American Gothic” (1974), inspired by the serial killer H. H. Holmes, and the Cthulhu Mythos novel “Strange Eons” (1978). He wrote two sequels to his most famous book, “Psycho II” (1982) and “Psycho House” (1990); neither is related to the film sequels.
His honours included the Bram Stoker Award and the lifetime achievement award of the first World Fantasy Convention in 1975, and he served as president of the Mystery Writers of America in 1970. His autobiography, “Once Around the Bloch”, was published in 1993. He died of cancer in Los Angeles on 23 September 1994, aged 77.
Photo: Will Hart, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).