Psycho II

Two decades after Alfred Hitchcock released an incredibly successful film version of Psycho, author Robert Bloch wrote a Scream 3-style (actually, I guess Scream 3 is Psycho II-style) self-referentialish sequel, and it's just as pulpy and pseudo-intellectual as the first book.
At the start of the book, Norman Bates escapes the mental hospital in which he's been incarcerated for twenty years and the psychiatrist who'd been working with him goes off to find him, certain that Norman is headed to Hollywood to stop the movie being made based on his story.
In Hollywood, we meet a self-centered actress who cares more about her own big break than pretty much anything else (which would be fine if it weren't for the fact that I think Bloch was trying to make her a sympathetic character; he failed on all counts. She's awful), a scriptwriter who I think was supposed to have a personality but the author didn't do a very good job of giving him one, a producer who's such a stereotype that he's barely worth mentioning, a sleazy and violence-obsessed director, a washed-up leading man who took the part of Norman to get his career back on track and a washed-up former scriptwriter who runs a motel and puts Norman's doctor in room Number Six, the same room Norman put Mary Crane in at the Bates Motel in the first book (which has nothing to do with anything other than it's something I noticed. The phrase "Number Six" always jumps out at me for some reason. Golly, I can't imagine why).
From then on, a whole lot of nothing happens. I mean, I stuff happens, but none of it is as interesting or suspenseful as it should be. Maybe I'm just jaded but it really did feel like three hundred pages of nothin' goin' on:
The doctor sees Norman at the supermarket, the actress tries to seduce the doctor, the screenwriter tries his damnedest to have a personality, the actor gets a chapter or two from his point of view even though he's pretty much a pointless addition to the book's cast of characters.
That's part of the problem. There are too many characters and the plot is ... not convoluted exactly, but it seems to have a lot of plot threads that, while it's not that they don't go anywhere, they do seem pointless by book's end. I guess they're red herrings. It was just really hard to care about them even when they seemed like they might be important.
Psycho II's resolution is silly and makes no sense (and this is coming from a girl who likes the end of Haute Tension). Just like the first book, Bloch uses the last couple of chapters to explain everything with psychology mumbo jumbo. Unlike the first book (where the ending was spoiled from page one by the fact that I've seen the movie), Psycho II's ending was a surprise; the book kept me guessing the whole way through. I just didn't think the ending (or even the chapters leading up to it, really) was that good.
I'm thinking maybe I'm not a fan of Robert Bloch, which doesn't bode well for the third book in the series, Psycho House, which I will be reading next.
On the other hand, it might bode well for the movie sequel to Psycho, which has absolutely nothing to do with the book, and which I do plan on seeing at some point.

End of line.
-Sally