Book cover of The Dead Beat

Book description

Vintage paperback reprint "by the author of Psycho."

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Dead Beat as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Published a year after his infamous novel Psycho, Bloch’s The Dead Beat is an offbeat short novel about a piano player named Larry Fox.

Larry’s a bad seed with a criminal record who worms his way into a suburban American family’s house after they discover him unconscious in the back of their car and learn that he’d been attacked. Larry keeps a lot of secrets and has a lot of big dreams, most of them around seducing teenage girls and extorting his former crime partner.

The story has some sections that read as dated, which isn’t surprising for a…

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