When the Bates Motel looms up out of the storm, Mary Crane thinks it is her salvation. The rooms are musty but clean. The manager, Norman Bates, seems like a nice enough fellow, if a little strange. Then Mary decides to take a shower, and the nightmare begins....

It was a dark and stormy night when Mary Crane glimpsed the unlit neon sign announcing the vacancy at the Bates Motel. Exhausted, lost, and at the end of her rope, she was eager for a hot shower and a bed for the night. Her room was musty, but clean, and the manager seemed nice, if a little odd.

It's 1960. Norman Bates is in the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and it's up to Dr. Felix Reed to bring him out of his catatonic state. But Norman and Dr. Reed have obstacles in twisted fellow patients and staff members who think of the institution as a prison rather than a place of healing. And the greatest obstacle is the building itself, once a private sanitarium, rumored to be haunted. A wild card appears in the persona of Robert Newman, Norman's twin brother, taken away at birth after the attending doctor pronounced him brain damaged.

You remember Norman Bates, the shy motel manager with the fatal mother fixation. Now, years after his horrific bout of butchery, Norman is at large again. Breaking free from the psycho ward, he cuts a shocking swath of blood all the way to Hollywood - where, it so happens, they are making a movie about Norman’s life and crimes. A movie that suddenly and terrifyingly becomes a lot like real life.

The new Bates Motel is a tourist attraction, a re-creation of the infamous murder site, and the developers are already counting their profits. But there’s a new exhibit that nobody expected: the bloody corpse of a teenage girl crumpled in the front hall, stabbed to death. Among the avalanche of press and publicity is reporter and true-crime book writer Amelia Haines, who is studying the original Psycho killings.