'NORMAN WAS HER FIRST. Marion is in deep. She's stolen money from the Manhattan ad agency where she works in a desperate bid to help her sister escape an abusive marriage, but the bus breaks down before she can make it to Saratoga Springs. It's late at night, and the only place with vacancies is an old set of cabins on the outskirts of town. She pays for a room in cash, and ends up chatting with Norm, the young innkeeper who's handsome, charming and a touch hung-up on his elderly mother. Back in her room, she steps into the shower, scrubbing off the late-summer heat, when the curtain is pulled back...
'Norm Billings is there with a knife. He raises his arm to strike, but before he does, Marion knees him in the balls, grabs the knife, and stabs the life out of him. Now, she's covered in blood, and she's a woman on the run—not just a thief, but a killer, too. Where will she go? How will she save both herself and her sister? And what mysteries will she uncover as she does?
'In Psycho, Hitchcock shocked audiences when he killed off his protagonist. But what if the leading lady had fought back? Marion offers an alternate history of the most famous dead blonde to ever grace the silver screen. Only this time, the knife is in her hands—and she's no victim.'
The original Psycho is a classic of cinema, not only spawning multiple sequels (which are all really good films too!) but inspiring staples of cinema going forward, such as the slasher genre, and the pretty blonde victim trope. The fact that the film followed its supposed lead, Marion Crane, for the entire first act, and that Hitchcock cast major star Janet Leigh in the role made her sudden murder at the hands of Norman Bates one of the biggest shocks in cinema history, especially at the time. It changed what people thought films could do, and it made the brutal stabbing of Marion Crane a piece of history.
But, what could happen if Marion didn't die? What if she fought with Norman over the knife? What if she managed to not just survive, but became the only person to come out of that bathroom alive? These questions, built around a modernisation, are what lies at the heart of Leah Rowan's Marion, a novel that turns cinema's most memorable victim into a fierce survivor.
Marion tells the story of two women, across shifting points in time. The main focus of the book is 'Marion', a woman whose real name we never learn over the course of the story. Marion works in New
York City at a major advertising firm, where her boss brings her into a secret meeting with a rich new client. Agreeing to take $100,000 in cash there and then to work on a new campaign, Marion's boss sneakily tells her that he's doing it off the books, looking to break away from the firm and use this client to set up his own business; a business he wants Marion to come and work for. Giving Marion the money, with instructions to take it to the bank and put it in his personal account, he leaves Marion with the cash whilst he takes the client for a night on the town.
However, when Marion is turned away from the bank and is unable to deposit the cash without her boss present she's left holding the $100,000 over the weekend. To make matters worse, Marion learns that her sister, Lauren, who was staying with her for the week after her husband hit her, has decided to go back home without telling her. Knowing that her sister is in danger, and that she needs a small fortune to leave her abusive husband without losing her business, Marion sets out to save her sister, the stacks of cash in tow. Thanks to a broken down buss, Marion ends up stuck in a small town named New Paltz overnight, where she manages to find accommodation in the Billings Motel, ran by a strange but charming man named Norm. Trying decide what her next move should be, Marion soon finds all of her plans, and her entire future, at risk when Norm attacks her in the shower with a knife. Now Marion not only has a sister to save, a stolen $100,000 in her luggage, but also a dead body to deal with.
Interspersed with Marion's narrative is the story of Hannah Pierce, a private investigator trying to find a missing young woman who may have stopped in New Paltz. Set two weeks after the events of Marion's story, Hannah's investigation into the missing girl leads her into a mystery that involves murder, and the twisted lair of a serial killer.
Those familiar with Psycho will understand how the story is supposed to go, and know that after Marion's death at the hands of Norman her sister eventually comes looking for her at the Bates motel weeks later. Marion takes the structure of the film and plays with it in delightful ways, using the shifting times and different character perspectives to play homage to the original story whilst being hugely creative in its own ways. There's very little that I can actually say about the book beyond the initial set-up and comparing it to the original as the book does so many interesting new things that create its own new narrative that discussing them would spoil parts of a mystery that readers will be wanting to try and solve themselves. All I can say is that I was surprised at how much the novel was able to avoid just being a retelling or a modernisation, and managed to create a story that felt inspired by the film whilst being its own animal.
Leah Rowan does a phenomenal job with the shifting narrative, and creates an interweaving story that adds the twists and surprised that readers get to experience. Every time I thought that I knew what was coming, or what I was seeing, something happened that not only subverted those expectations but took the plot in a new and unexpected direction that made the book so much more fun. There were a few times where I'd find myself yelling 'what?!' out loud, or flipping back to an earlier part of the book to see just how Rowan had managed to mess with me so wonderfully.
Marion was described to me as a 'feminist retelling of Psycho', and I can't think of a better way to sum it up. The book has so many good women characters in it that are not only standing up to terrible, shitty men, but in doing so discovering a fierceness and strength that they never knew they had before. The book showcases these transformations incredibly well, it makes them believable, and it even kind of has you wanting to see them come out on top despite it meaning getting away with murder. It was fantastic to see such strong women not only getting the centre stage, but seeing terrible men get put in their place.
Marion was an incredibly fun read, one that was filled with twists and turns that keep the narrative from ever feeling stale, yet also serving the characters stories well. If you're familiar with the original story you won't be able to predict what happens throughout the book, and you'll get to have just as much fun as someone coming to this completely fresh. As someone with a great deal of respect for Psycho this felt like not only a brilliant reinvention of it, but a carefully crafted love letter to it.
Marion is available now from Titan Books.
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