I can remember my first time watching Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, Psycho, on Turner Classic Movies. I was 14 years old, it was late June 2000, and I was making my way through the backlog of classic horror films as I worked to educate myself on the genre.
I knew of the famous shower scene accompanied by the stabbing violin music since it had been recreated and parodied countless times, even in children’s cartoons. Other than that, I didn’t know much about the film.
TCM was promoting the showing of Psycho all week, likely due to it being the 40th anniversary of its release. My enthusiasm was catching enough that I persuaded my whole family to sit down and watch it. Watching it on TV commercial-free cable where I knew that it was playing in countless other living rooms on a hot, summer night made it a very unique and memorable experience.
Admittedly, I found the first half of the film to be very slow. This wasn’t like the 90s slasher movies where we saw a murder in the opening act and then it took off from there. This was a slow burn.
And when our heroine, Marion Crane, stepped into the shower, I was confused as to how she was going to survive some old lady bursting in with a knife in one of the most vulnerable positions you can be in. Spoiler alert: she didn’t.
Becoming a Psycho fan
My absolute love of Psycho developed in repeat viewings as the seemingly small details bloomed into something more significant and its messages became clearer. Everything from severe mental illness to childhood trauma to spur of the moment decisions that change the course of your life as well as the inability to trust what you’re seeing right in front of you are fascinating themes that are explored and picked apart by film fans to this day.
This film spawned three sequels, a nearly shot-for-shot remake in the 90s, and its own TV show inspired by the events of this film which were inspired by the events of the Robert Bloch novel of the same name. The novel is pretty close to the original film with some notable exceptions, but it too ends up with Marion dead halfway through the text.
My idea for a retelling
I always thought that if you were to remake the film for a new audience, the iconic twist in the second act would likely have to go. Not only would it be too predictable to loyal fans, but a modern audience probably would not appreciate the murder of its main character who we spent the first act becoming so invested in, even if she is a clumsy thief and Norman (the film version at least), is so likable, both before and after his true nature is revealed.
I used to imagine a version of the story where Marion survives the attack in the shower and ends up detaining Norman. From there, she hides out in the house, learning more about her would-be murderer while biding her time until she can figure out her next move. Does she continue with her plan to run away with Sam Loomis or go home, return the money she had pilfered, and apologize to her boss and his pervy client who is the true owner of the funds?
Author Leah Rowan has beat me to the punch, though, with her novel, Marion. This book’s bright yellow cover caught my eye at Walmart. The title name paired with the knife-wielding arm illustration inspired me to pick this book up.
And sure enough, I found that this book was a retelling of Psycho in which this Marion not only survives Norman but takes his place as the murderer, one who murders the men who have wronged both her and the person she loves the most.
This revelation is no spoiler. The tagline on the cover reads, “Norman was her first.” The mystery that unfolds is how Marion was driven to murder.
Below is my review of Rowan’s Marion. Let me know your thoughts on my review and the Psycho franchise in general in the comments!
Marion plot summary
It’s July 2023, and our unnamed narrator is attempting to convince her older sister, Lauren, who has been staying with her in her apartment in Manhattan, to leave her abusive husband, Rob. Lauren is reluctant to end her marriage, though, and while our heroine is at work at an ad agency, Lauren returns home.
That same day, a client of our narrator’s boss comes in with a $100,000 downpayment deposit in cash. Her boss, David, asks her to deposit it into his personal account and reveals that he’s leaving the company and wants to take her with him.
When the bank won’t accept the deposit without permission from the account holder, the narrator instead intends to take the money and use it to get Lauren out of her troubled marriage. She hops on a bus to Saratoga Springs, but when it breaks down, she’s forced to stay the night in a rundown motel run by a charming, yet lonely, Norm Billings.
After sharing a meal with Norm, the narrator weighs her options. Then, Norm attacks her in the shower of her motel room. But our narrator fights back, and in that moment, her alter ego, Marion, is born.
The story
What’s fun about reading a retelling is that you know the skeleton of the story, and it’s the quarter turns that the author makes to the original source material that bends it into something new. In this case, Rowan shapes the story into a feminist revenge tale.
It’s difficult to condone such murderous actions, but it also shows the rabbit hole of a thought process that one can fall down when backed into a corner. If self defense is justified, then maybe so is turning the tables on a rigged game in which men used to getting away with their bad behavior receive very harsh, yet, eye-opening consequences for their own despicable actions.
A lot of the time, we are in the narrator’s head as she explains how she got to this point. This isn’t just one bad day that causes her to snap. This is the breaking point of a lifetime of feeling pinned down by societal norms, and the events that follow show just how intense that breaking point becomes.
However, the story is also very plot driven. The first half very closely follows the events of the original story, particularly the film, just with the changes needed to fit a modern sequence of events, a change in setting, and a sister’s love to replace the romantic one.
Sometimes, we can defend our loved ones in ways that we would never imagine defending ourselves. Marion’s drive to save her sister gives her the motivation she needs to not only begin her journey but to see it through.
The stolen money is still the MacGuffin of the story. It just gets our hero to where she needs to be to kick off her adventure and downward spiral into murder and mayhem. From there, though, it becomes its own animal with an ending very far removed from the original text.
The characters
I found it interesting to compare Marion’s actions with those of the original Norman Bates. We give Norman a pass, at least with our emotions, because he’s severely mentally ill and the victim of childhood abuse. What he does is wrong, but it’s largely out of his control, even if he is the one wielding the knife.
Because this is Marion’s story, we’re not certain how this Norm’s mind works. Rowan uses a “show don’t tell” approach to just hinting at clues about his history, his mindset, and the execution, no pun intended, of his murderous actions. But this isn’t Norm’s story. He’s just the inciting incident that leads to Marion’s journey.
This book’s Marion comes from a stable home. She has a lot of advantages, such as her good looks, her good job, and her sense of independence. She speaks often of her mother, a social worker who really drilled home the need to be vigilant against men by sharing stories of her clients who became their human punching bags, sometimes at the expense of their own lives.
Like Norma Bates is to Norman, Marion’s mother is the driving force behind her daughter’s actions. Her mother’s voice tells her how to take care of each situation, how to press forward, and how to live with the results.
Yet, unlike the mother/son relationship, this mother isn’t about punishing the innocent out of jealousy. She’s intent on protecting future victims by making sure the perpetrators don’t continue the behavior that they can so easily get away with, whether it’s murder, embezzlement, or domestic violence. This is what gives the reader such an ambivalent attitude towards the two.
Yes, these men have gotten away with too much for too long, but is this really the only answer? No matter what you believe, it’s certainly an effective answer, possibly one that can serve as a cautionary tale for men who tend to take things too far. Whatever misery you inflict on women can come back to you tenfold.
The message
That being said, the book really drives this message into the ground. It takes that modern approach of not trusting the audience enough to break it all down themselves and is constantly trying to justify itself with backstory and a lack of remorse shown by the men who meet their bitter ends for the part that they played in the story’s events.
In her fury, Marion regularly misjudges the situations laid out before her. She takes an act first and ask questions later approach. Of course, she is going up against opponents that are bigger and stronger than her. So, hesitation is out of the question. If she kills them purposely, they can’t kill her accidentally.
The genre change in the second half
Like the original Psycho book and movie, the second half of the story centers around investigating Marion’s disappearance. Our Private Detective Arbogast is now a wannabe PI named Hannah who is actually investigating the disappearance of one of Norm’s prior victims, Emily Stockton.
Hannah takes it upon herself to begin the investigation without the go ahead from her superiors first. She’s very capable and calculated in her search, and this leads her to some satisfying results.
When Hannah is introduced, her narrative follows a timeline that runs a few weeks after the initial events of the story, and it sucks some of the momentum out of Marion’s stories as her chapters are inserted in between Marion’s. Her backstory also isn’t very interesting, nor is her personality.
We root for her because Hannah is the traditional hero, one who is actually trying to do some good for the female victims and do it by the book. Of course, we know from Marion’s commentary on our patriarchal society that the deck is stacked against Hannah. So, no matter how thorough she is, her efforts are largely going to be ignored, particularly when it challenges the investigation of the actual investigating officers.
It’s not that Hannah needed to be more flawed. She just needed more fleshed out character traits, motivations, and maybe something that made her feel more real and whose chapters didn’t seem like such a hinderance to the main storyline.
There is some predictability to the story’s outcome. However, I didn’t expect it to wind up where it did.
The big twist that Hannah discovers didn’t land very well for me. I liked how it paid homage to the grossly underrated Psycho II, but in terms of the larger story it was trying to tell, it didn’t do much for it. And where the characters all end up feels very unfinished and unrealistic.
My recommendation
Ultimately, I had a lot of fun reading Marion. It wasn’t perfect, but it was page-turning, full of memorable moments, and had a very distinct modern message to share. Sometimes one impulsive action can kick off a chain of events that can alter your worldview, your actions, and, ultimately, your life.
The book suggests that we all have a Marion in us. In a certain way, I hope that’s true. I hope that, if I’m ever called upon to do the hard thing in the moment, my version of Marion will come out in me to protect me and anyone else from an evil person’s actions.
But in being true to the original story, Rowan suggests that this Marion takes things way too far. She can no longer rationalize or take a moment to think about the best way to approach a situation. Norm pushed her too far, and now, she is the byproduct of being seen as less than for far too long, and it has created a monster that won’t put up with it.
It definitely causes you to question that instinct to just shrug off bad guys because “what can you do?” Overkill is an extreme option, but you can’t argue with its results.
Because it diverts so far from the original story in its second half, I probably wouldn’t have stuck so close to the original source materials. This story has a very distinct message to share, one that doesn’t need a classic story with its own agenda as a close blueprint to follow but one that could have been even more original and distinct from that source material so that it could better stand alone as an independent story.
However, I acknowledge that the retelling aspect was what made me decide to read this book to begin with. So, maybe there’s something to be said about piggybacking off of a classic in order to create something new.
My rating
Also check out my post, An Introduction to Black and White Horror Movies, here!
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