The Art and History of Movie Novelizations Free

When most young writers enter the business, I suspect they do so with quiet dreams of one day earning the respect of their peers by winning a Pulitzer or snagging a lucrative Hollywood deal. My own early dreams were more modest and attainable. When I began writing professionally, in the late 1980s, the idea of winning prestigious awards or grabbing some major studio money, let alone earning anyone’s respect, never occurred to me. My sole literary dream from the start was to write movie novelizations. That questionable goal, and why it’s yet to be fulfilled, probably deserves some explaining.

Alfred Hitchcock once said that it’s nearly impossible to make a good film out of a great book, but fairly easy to make a great film out of a bad book. The exceptions tend to prove the rule. Orson Welles’s The Lady From Shanghai (1947), Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), and Hitchcock’s own Psycho (1960) were all based on tawdry pulp novels. The novel that formed the basis of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) was churned out quickly with the director in mind by the hack pairing of Boileau-Narcejac (pen-name of the French co-writers Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud). The two had previously written the literary inspiration for Les Diaboliques (1955), which Henri-Georges Clouzot snapped up before Hitchcock could land the rights. By the same token, filmed adaptations of Dostoyevsky, Poe, Hemingway and other literary giants tend to be dreadful by nature. The cinematic abuse heaped on Poe’s work is particularly egregious, from D.W. Griffith’s short films to the silent era German Expressionist film Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, Hanns Heinz Ewers and Stellan Rye, 1913), Universal’s 1932 quickie Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert Florey), Roger Corman’s Vincent Price vehicles, the Italian Giallo anthology Tre passi nel delirio (Spirits of the Dead, Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini, 1968), Mike Flanagan’s most recent Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher (2023) and, quite literally, hundreds of others. But if I turn Hitchcock’s dictum on its head (that is, “it’s nearly impossible to write a good book based on a great film, but fairly easy to write a great book based on a bad film”), I have an entryway into the shadowy, marginalized world of movie novelizations.

The term generally refers to cheap mass market paperbacks based on TV shows, video games, and especially movies. Instead of turning trashy books into films, it’s a matter of turning films into trashy books. Today, novelizations are an all but lost art (if it can be called that), but, in their heyday, they were part and parcel of mass movie culture. The novelization as a form, even as an idea, has long been denigrated by literary critics and the general reading public alike as a disposable gutter genre, written at a sixth-grade level by desperate hacks on the skids who were likely too ashamed to admit they’d sunk so low as to churn them out. Even the term “novelization” itself implies they aren’t real novels. They are simulacra at best, products, empty marketing tools, the result of a crude mechanical operation inflicted upon a legitimate art form. There’s some truth in that assessment, but I would hesitate before dismissing the entire genre with a derisive snort. Atrocious as most are in literary terms, the form and purpose of novelizations remain a more complex cultural artifact than one might expect.

My own obsession with novelizations began in the early 1970s, when I picked up the mass-market paperbacks based on the original Planet of the Apes films. It struck me at the time that David Gerrold’s 1973 novelization of Battle for the Planet of the Apes was much better than the J. Lee Thompson film of the same year. Young as I was, I was curious. How could words on a page be more effective than the immediacy of the Technicolor action on the screen?

After undertaking a close textual analysis of the hundreds of movie novelizations in my personal archive, I’ve concluded they represent an unfairly overlooked and maligned American literary genre, much like newspaper crime blotters, obituaries, and porn novels. While none of the titles in my collection were shortlisted for a National Book Award, some were far better than I expected. In cultural terms, from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, novelizations served a clear and definite purpose. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, they continue to serve a purpose, albeit a very different one.

As a literary form, novelizations can be traced back to the early decades of the twentieth century, when stage plays and silent films were occasionally adapted into books. A year after Tod Browning’s (now famously lost) London After Midnight was released in 1927, for instance, Marie Coolidge-Rask published the official novelization. A few months before the original King Kong (Merion C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack) hit theaters in 1933, Delos W. Lovelace’s novelization appeared in bookstores in hopes of generating a bit of early buzz. While novelizations of popular films would appear now and again for roughly the next thirty-five years, they remained little more than scattered curiosities. Then, as marketing and publicity departments grew into the most powerful wings of every major Hollywood studio, they became ubiquitous.

In the 1970s, considered the golden era of the form, novelizations joined soundtrack albums, games, lunch boxes, tie-in comic books, trading cards, and other ephemera as one more tool the studios used to promote nearly every new release. While it wasn’t terribly surprising to find novelizations of silly popcorn fodder like Meatballs III: Summer Job (George Mendeluk, 1986), unlikely prestigious films earned novelizations of their own as well, including Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961), Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), and François Truffaut’s L’argent de poche (Small Change, 1976). Most novelizations could only be found on bookstore shelves as long as the source film was in circulation. Once the film was gone, the books no longer served any purpose, at least from a studio and publisher perspective. This is why most novelizations only saw a single printing, and why, since royalties wouldn’t be an issue, most authors worked for a flat fee up front. It was only after a film disappeared from theaters that the novelization’s true function was revealed.

In most instances, novelizations could not be held to the same standards as “real” novels. The prose and dialogue tended to be stilted and pretentious. The characters stretched to reach two dimensions, the emotions were broad and simplistic, but the target audience was not looking for literary subtlety or poetic flourishes. To them, the form served one important and singular purpose far removed from major studio marketing departments.

In those distant pre-cable, pre-home video, pre-streaming days, if fans wanted to see a beloved film again after it left theaters, they had three choices. Those who were lucky enough to live near a revival house could pray a screening popped up on its repertory schedule. Others could wait even more hopelessly for one of the networks to broadcast it as a Movie of the Week (ABC, 1969–75), trimmed and interrupted as it would be by censors and commercials. Failing these two options, they could still head down to the local drug store and pick up the novelization off the paperback carousel. Novelizations, as bad as they were in most cases, still allowed people to re-experience a favorite film by proxy whenever they liked, imagining the faces and voices and settings they’d seen on the screen. If the book remained faithful to the movie, it made the transition from one medium to another relatively easy. In some cases, and for a variety of reasons, the gulf between the page and screen could be vast. The secret ingredient was the reader-viewer’s imagination, an alternative space where a private movie screened nightly.

The standard plan was to get novelizations into stores in the weeks prior to a film’s release. Commissioned authors were handed scripts and set to work fairly early in the production. In other words, novelizations often operated without access to the final cut, creating parallel lines that might diverge dramatically from the film’s visual style or even its plot. There are things movies can do that books cannot, and vice versa. Novelizations put medium specificity theories of art to the test, often warping them in wonderfully odd ways. Most scripts are skeletal affairs, just dialogue and minimal descriptions of settings and action. This leaves it to the author of the novelization to bulk up the story to book length by adding his or her own detailed character backgrounds, inner monologues, subplots and other material that wouldn’t or couldn’t make it onto the screen. The voice at the heart of any novelization, then, tends to be a blend of the screenwriter and the cheap hack, with the percentage of each of these voices varying by project. Scripts can evolve dramatically as a film’s production progresses. Depending on the director’s vision, scenes can be revised, replaced or cut altogether, characters can be added or excised, and endings can be radically reworked. Due to the often nearly-impossibly tight deadlines that confront novelization authors, there isn’t always an opportunity to make revisions that more closely synched with the final shooting script. Although their implied intent is to faithfully recreate in prose what audiences saw in the theater, many novelizations stray wildly from the film, even contradicting basic plot points. If their role as a promotional tool justifies the novelization’s existence, it’s their broad poetic license—their delightfully disobedient messiness—that keeps them interesting.

A few novelization authors took this creative freedom to extremes. In 1981, the year before he supposedly directed Poltergeist (1982), Tobe Hooper directed a grimy little slasher film called The Funhouse. As slasher films go, there wasn’t much new or inventive here. The script, by Lawrence J. Block (not to be confused with the bestselling mystery novelist Lawrence Block), stuck close to the by-then well-established formula, while liberally lifting from the likes of Don’t Look in the Basement (S.F. Browning, 1973) and Beat Girl (Edmond T. Gréville, 1960). Four teens on a double date decide to spend the night in a seedy traveling carnival’s funhouse, only to be dispatched in assorted unique ways by a stereotypical hulking killer in a Frankenstein mask. That’s about it. The movie, in other words, doesn’t give an author much to go on, which makes the resulting novelization all the more curious. It was written by future bestselling horror novelist Dean Koontz under the pen name “Owen West.” While few novelizations as a rule ventured much beyond 175 pages, The Funhouse (1980) rolls on for a sprawling 350 pages of intertwining characters and plotlines. It centers on an unbalanced man seeking revenge against his ex-wife by killing the children she’s had with her new husband. It almost feels like the Hooper film was based on the novel, and the producers decided to focus on that one small section featuring the teens and the mad killer. This was not the case. Koontz, whose own career was just getting underway at the time, was brought on to novelize The Funhouse, and things got out of hand. I’m convinced he already had his own book in mind when he signed the contract, then used the easy novelization work to get it out there in disguise. He’s since put his own name back on the cover, and the book, unlike most novelizations of the era, remains in print.

Another similar case study is fascinating for different reasons. Richard Elman (not to be confused with the James Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann) had the unenviable task of novelizing Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Instead of attempting to capture the film’s seedy atmosphere, violence, and misbegotten characters, Elman’s book takes the form of Travis Bickle’s diary, which in turn was loosely based on would-be presidential assassin Arthur Bremer’s diary. It’s a unique and inventive approach, but something went awry. In the Scorsese film, Travis is alienated, angry, and semi-literate. In the novelization he’s suddenly not only literate and thoughtful, but he also writes in a florid purple prose. Furthermore, it seems almost as if the deeply damaged Travis has been replaced somewhere along the line by Lord Byron having a bad day. It left me thinking Elman, considering the novelization job beneath him, approached the book as an opportunity to show off his (sadly meager) literary chops. If nothing else, it provides an illustration of what little attention studio marketing machines were paying to the genre, how little they cared about the contents of the novelization so long as the film’s title and poster art appeared on the cover.

Jaws 2 (Jeannot Szwarc, 1978) was, from a critical and box office standpoint, a disaster on every level. Even by sequel standards, it was lazy, redundant and contrived. Hank Searls, meanwhile, was a prolific author and screenwriter known for his complex military thrillers focused on aviation and the space program. This, of course, made him the obvious go-to guy when producers at Universal went looking for someone to crank out a novelization. The first clue that something might be askew was the paperback’s cover art, which, apart from the title and the iconic shark, bore no resemblance to the film’s one sheet. The contents followed suit. When an author’s clear contempt for the source film is evidenced in the tie-in novel, the results can make for some of the form’s most intriguing entries.

I’m not sure if Searls was given a script which he promptly burned, or if the film’s producers, knowing what a mess they had on their hands and hoping to distract potential moviegoers, told Searls to write whatever he wanted so long as it involved a killer shark in some way. Searls’s story has no connection to the film. More than anything, it feels like a sequel to the original Peter Benchley novel, not the Spielberg movie. Martin Brody is still Amity’s chief of police, but he spends much of the book dealing with a handful of personal and familial troubles while brooding over that earlier unpleasantness at the beach. I recall something about a shark in there someplace, but I can’t be absolutely certain. Although the book is well written and richly detailed—a work by a seasoned pro with some insight into character development and plotting—Searls is clearly out of his element. While readers who pick up the novel called Jaws 2 would find nothing close to what they were looking for, it’s still more entertaining than the movie. Searls would be brought back a decade later, perhaps with the same understanding, to novelize Jaws: The Revenge (Joseph Sargent, 1987).

During my close study of the form, I encountered a few more surprises. Call them the rarest of the rare: a handful of cheap mass market novelizations that somehow eclipsed the films they were based upon. Returning to that upended Hitchcock dictum, the trick to writing a novelization more memorable than the source film seems to involve choosing an outrageously terrible movie to begin with.

In the mid 1970s, when a spate of post-Jaws killer animal movies featured big critters with wicked claws and fangs, writer/director Jeff Lieberman took a counterintuitive route. Recognizing just how many people were skeeved out by small slimy things that wriggled, he made Squirm (1976), the world’s first killer earthworm movie. Give the creepy crawlies sharp pinchers, dump millions of them on the screen, have them burrow their way through a few townsfolk, and you have a doozie of a horror movie on your hands. In theory, anyway. When it came to the execution and the acting—and effects—and lighting—and pacing—the going was a little rough. Squirm is recognized today as a cult classic, less for the film itself than for the idea that inspired it.

The novelization by Richard Curtis (not to be confused with the British writer-director)—which I picked up at a truck stop in Utah—takes the potential of the film and puts it on the page for the reader’s imagination to fulfill. Precisely because I could only see it in my mind’s eye, the prologue alone, which was scaled back and murky in the film, has stuck with me ever since. Curtis, who has also written several serious history tomes, is an effective horror stylist who, while mostly sticking to Lieberman’s dialogue and storyline, has a way with a description (a corpse exploding with worms, for instance) that could really get under your skin. While it can hardly be called capital-A Art, Curtis’s book does provide another illustration of what can be achieved with prose that can’t be translated to the screen (especially when the filmmaker has no money).

A year after Squirm, Rollercoaster (James Goldstone, 1977) offered an enlightening example of a novelization that revealed what the source film would not. Following Earthquake (Mark Robson, 1974) and Midway (Jack Smight, 1976), Rollercoaster became the third and last original feature to be released in Sensurround, a much hyped, pre-Dolby gimmick that purported to allow moviegoers to experience directly the rumbling action depicted on the screen. Director James Goldstone’s movie had a lot of potential: a gimmick, an almost-all-star cast, a decent story, and a substantial enough budget—it was hoped—to bury any fatal flaws. Somehow, it all went horribly wrong anyway. Timothy Bottoms plays an unnamed psychopath who sabotages thrill rides at amusement parks across the country. George Segal plays the federal agent trying to track him down. Audiences itching to see graphic and bloody Tilt-A-Whirl and Ferris wheel accidents would be disappointed. Instead, the film’s action sequences, by and large, are limited to repeated, extended shots from the front car of a rollercoaster, a washed-out trope going back as far as the first wave of 3-D movies in the 1950s. The fact that Bottoms’s character is never named and his motivations are never clarified renders the film all but pointless—an exercise in drab nihilism (except, perhaps, for niche fans of old wooden rollercoasters).

Burton Wohl’s novelization, based on an early draft of the script, not only gives the psychopath a name (Eddie Parnassus) but also fleshes out his background and clarifies his clear, even arguably justifiable, motivation. This, it turns out, is precisely why those details were cut from the film: The killer might earn the audience’s sympathies. The producers were worried not only about humanizing their villain but also about running the risk of having audiences cheer on his deadly amusement park carnage. Instead of muddying the moral waters and making an interesting film that people might actually talk about afterward (“Are acts of terrorism ever justified?”), they decided it best to go the bland route and add three more extended coaster-cam shots. Beyond developing the central character, Wohl also gave stories and personalities to several side characters (including a disturbingly lecherous park janitor), and went some distance toward capturing the lights and jangle, the filth and general whirl of an amusement park through a collection of telling details. He accomplishes a lot more in a slim 120-page novel than the film did in its overlong two-hour run time.

The Car (Elliot Silverstein, 1977) was released the same summer as Rollercoaster. I have a deep personal affection for this beautifully shot, existentialist Jaws knockoff about a murderous devil car. It always leaves me thinking that if Ingmar Bergman had decided to make a killer-car movie, this would be it. The Car also features a cast of recognizable character actors: James Brolin, Ronny Cox, R.G. Armstrong, John Marley and Kim Richards. For reasons never made clear, Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey was apparently the film’s technical consultant.

As much as I enjoy the movie, Dennis Shryack’s novelization improves upon it in several ways. Shryack takes some particularly clunky and awkward dialogue from the film and turns it into far more believable internal monologues. He fills in the plot holes that might leave most audience members scratching their heads and, as much as possible, explains a confusing and unsatisfying climax. Most important, as novelizations were not subject to the strict censorship of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) ratings board, Shryack was able to restore the gore, cursing, and sex that would never have made it into a PG-rated film. I was twelve at the time, so these were important matters.

Returning to the question that launched me on this foolish quest: why is the novelization of Battle for the Planet of the Apes so much better than the movie? I’d read Gerrold’s novelization before seeing the film, and, in a way, it ruined me. It wasn’t that I knew what to expect before I entered the theater. I never cared about that. It’s also not that Gerrold’s story varied radically from the film. It didn’t. In fact, it was a more faithful adaptation than most. The trick here, as with Squirm, was that Gerrold somehow compensated for the film’s minuscule budget. In the film, for instance, the final confrontation between the apes and an invading army of mutant humans—intended to be the film’s centerpiece—was a sad and hapless thing. Because of budget constraints the mutant “army” consisted of four or five broken down trucks and about fifteen actors. The attempt to disguise this by shooting everything in close-up didn’t work particularly well. In the novelization, the mutant army is a real and formidable threat, and the battle sequence rolls on for pages. In the film, the entire titular battle lasts five minutes. In my imagination, as I read the book, the production values increased dramatically. In other words, Gerrold made the book what the deeply disappointing movie was striving to be—and at zero additional cost.

In at least two instances, novelizations have been used as a means of exacting revenge. Robert Bloch was an old-school pulp-horror novelist who was venturing into more modern psychological terrors when the story of Ed Gein, the Wisconsin-based graverobber and cannibal, broke in 1957. In 1959, Bloch whipped out a little novel called Psycho, loosely based on the Gein case. Being, as they were, naive times (and apparently lacking a very sharp agent), Bloch sold the movie rights to an unnamed filmmaker for $9,500. The contract left him with no option for royalties down the line, and completely cut him out of the screenwriting process. Instead, Hitchcock (who had taken steps to disguise his identity during the rights acquisition process) handed the screenwriting job to Joseph Stefano. It was a wise move, as Bloch’s novel was surprisingly ponderous. Even the shower murder, which did indeed appear in the novel, was kind of a snooze. In Bloch’s novel, Norman Bates was a chubby, pasty-faced man in his fifties. There was nothing at all charming or charismatic or sympathetic about him. He was just a creepy dork with a knife and mom issues. As Bloch decided what to do with his paltry check, Hitchcock turned his pulp horror novel into a cheap exploitation shocker destined to be studied by students, film scholars and fans alike long into the future. It also earned Hitchcock millions. Hitchcock also cleverly appeased doubtful producers by trading his usual director’s fee for a percentage of the film’s box office, a far bigger payday than he’d offered Bloch.

Bloch carried his resentment for Hitchcock around with him for years, and this feeling only seemed to grow more bitter as time passed. When, in 1982, Universal Studios announced Joseph Stefano would be directing Psycho II, it was clear that Bloch would not see a dime from the film endeavor, despite having created the character Norman Bates. When Bloch became aware of this, he whipped out another quickie novel, also called Psycho II. Bloch’s Psycho II was in no way connected with Stefano’s film. In fact, out of spite, Bloch kills off Norman in the first ten pages. Paired with a mass market reissue of his original novel, Bloch’s Psycho II hit bookstores a week before the film opened. The attempt at public confusion was a little too obvious, and it remains perhaps the only instance in which a fake novelization was produced in an effort to undercut the film it’s not based on. Give him points for trying.

Another intriguing “novelization as revenge” story concerns Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964). Peter George published Red Alert in 1958. It was a deadly serious cautionary novel about the possibility of both human and technical error coming together to trigger a global thermonuclear war. Stanley Kubrick, long obsessed with nuclear war, bought the rights to the novel, brought on Terry Southern to work on the script, and set about making a deadly serious cautionary film. Needless to say, things didn’t turn out quite that way. George was not exactly pleased with what had been done to his serious and hamfisted book. Red Alert vanished from bookstore shelves soon after Strangelove was released. It must have pissed off George to learn that people preferred the wacky Southern-Kubrick satire over his self-important tale about the Fate of Mankind in the Atomic Age. But George got his revenge against Kubrick and Southern.

Perhaps as an act of penance after learning George was so miffed, Kubrick authorized him to write the official Strangelove novelization. Red Alert is cited in the film’s opening credits, and George received equal billing with Kubrick and Southern for the screenplay. When you open to the title page of the 1964 Bantam paperback, however, it reads “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, by Peter George ... based on the screenplay by Stanley Kubrick.” There is no mention of Southern, of George’s own screenwriting credit, or of Red Alert. After distancing himself from the film that way, George’s real attempt at revenge can be found in the text.

Within a few pages it’s clear something funny is going on, and not exactly “ha-ha” funny. While all of Kubrick and Southern’s character names are there—Kong, Ripper, Turgidson—none of the film’s most memorable lines appear in the novelization. There isn’t a joke to be found. Yes, George scrubbed Dr. Strangelove clean of comedy, leaving characters with ridiculous names earnestly discussing serious issues. He even changed the ending, with General Ripper jetting off to safety instead of shooting himself in the bathroom. If this was an effort on George’s part to reclaim the tone and message of his original novel, it failed miserably. He produced something that can’t be taken seriously and isn’t funny—at least not intentionally funny.

All of these considerations bring up other questions about novelization authorship. While the majority were produced by assembly-line writers who rarely went on to do much else, it wasn’t uncommon for a film’s screenwriter to pen the novelization, especially if the screenwriter had a recognizable name. Assuming they would have the full treatment and script on hand, the novelization process should have been a simple matter of melding and expanding them with more verbs and adjectives. As with everything I discovered related to novelizations, however, the results were often surprising, if not always pleasant. Sylvester Stallone novelized his Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976) screenplay into a lifeless 125-page paperback. George Romero (who had an unfortunate affinity for the exclamation point) novelized several of his own films. After rejecting Paul Schrader’s screenplay for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Steven Spielberg wrote his own, as well as the novelization. While his novelization remains true to the film, at times it reads more like a collection of marginal notes he’d scribbled on his shooting script. While dropping a bankable name on the cover no doubt increased sales, letting the screenwriter pen the novelization too often laid bare the different skills required to write a script, as opposed to writing a book.

(If I may be allowed a quick aside, one of the stranger examples of exploiting a big name to increase sales arose with the novelization of The Deer Hunter. Slim as it is, E.M. Corder’s adaptation is quite good. It’s easy to miss his name, however, as Robert DeNiro’s name appears much more prominently on the cover despite the fact he had nothing to do with the book.)

Sometimes, budget permitting, established novelists were brought in to handle these jobs. Arthur Herzog had authored books on history and true crime, as well as the bestselling 1974 killer-bee novel The Swarm. Apparently assuming killer animals are killer animals, regardless of habitat, producers brought him in to novelize one of the biggest of the early Jaws rip-offs, Orca (Michael Anderson, 1977).

In 1967, roughly a decade after he wrote the screenplays for Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957), hardboiled crime novelist Jim Thompson wrote a novelization based on the TV detective series Ironside (NBC, 1967–75). Long after his death in 1977, Thompson’s nihilistic crime pulps finally received the hard-earned literary respect they deserved, and since then have gone on to inspire over a dozen film adaptations. Even if his Ironside novelization was an act of desperation for a man whose own dealings with Hollywood in the 1950s had been less than heartening, and even if the show didn’t deserve it, the brilliance of his two-fisted prose is still on full display in what has become a very collectible curiosity.

Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall was released in 1990, several years after the novelization had been declared a dead form. Still, perhaps realizing typical Arnold Schwarzenegger fans likely wouldn’t make much headway with the 1966 Philip K. Dick story that inspired it, famed science-fiction author Piers Anthony was brought in to novelize the film, making it a rare example of a big-budget all-star popcorn film bookended by two name authors.

In what is likely the best-known instance of a noted author tackling a gutter genre, William Kotzwinkle, a respected author of literary fiction at the time, was offered the contract to novelize Spielberg’s blockbuster E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). The book topped the paperback bestseller lists for weeks in the summer of 1982. Kotzwinkle went on to write a follow-up, E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet (1985), as well as the Superman III (Richard Lester, 1983) novelization. Although he eventually returned to literary fiction, he is now remembered not for his serious novels, but as the author of E.T.

Still other writers made names for themselves within the confines of the genre, defining their own brand of authorship under the radar—making the form uniquely their own, and becoming literary stars of a sort (or after a fashion), if in limited circles. While George Lucas received sole author credit on 1977’s Star Wars novelization, it had actually been ghostwritten by prolific science-fiction and fantasy author Alan Dean Foster. Prior to Star Wars, in and amongst his own work, Foster had published several collections of novelized episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series (NBC, 1973–74). In the years immediately following Star Wars, he established himself as the undisputed king of novelizations. Along with other Star Wars and Star Trek titles, he novelized The Last Starfighter (Nick Castle, 1984), The Black Hole (Gary Nelson, 1979), Clash of the Titans (Desmond Davis, 1981), The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982), most of the entries in the Alien franchise, and other high-profile sci-fi/fantasy films that hit theaters in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Foster’s own science fiction novels are not very good. The prose and dialogue are stiff and clumsy, the characters flat, and the plots predictable, but he did have a knack for atmosphere and action, all presented in very simple, easily digestible terms. These qualities made Foster a terrible novelist but an excellent novelizer, who understood what his target audience was looking for. This is why seeing his name on a novelization is always a sign of quality.

It was Foster’s example that convinced me I was destined to become a professional movie novelizer. Unfortunately, my timing was very poor. The form had largely died out before I’d published my first story. The introduction of commercially available VCRs and the appearance of mom-and-pop video stores across the country in the early 1980s dealt a fatal blow to the genre, at least as a large-scale commercial enterprise. Novelizations didn’t vanish completely, but the market dried up. Why revisit a favorite film by proxy via a sub-cinematic literary middleman when you have a Blockbuster just down the street?

I was fully aware of this, but remained reluctant to relinquish my dream. In the late 1990s, when I was a staff writer at a New York–based alternative weekly, I ran a small throwaway piece about my novelization collection. A few days later, I received a package from movie producer Richard P. Rubinstein. Rubinstein had worked on any number of horror and science fiction films, including several with George A. Romero and Stephen King. Along with a brief but pleasant note, he’d included copies of Romero’s novelizations of his own films, Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Martin (1977). In my thank-you note, I inquired if he might be in need of a writer to novelize any of his upcoming projects. In response, he returned my own letter with the query circled in red. In the margin, he’d scrawled the word “NO.”

Undaunted, a few years later I asked my agent to see if she could scrounge me up some novelization work. It took a bit to convince her I wasn’t joking. She got back to me a week later, explaining patiently that in the age of DVDs and the Internet, movie novelizations simply didn’t exist anymore. There wasn’t any need for them. Even if there was an interested readership, she further explained, these things are a tricky business from a strictly legal standpoint, what with ancillary rights and contracts and copyrights and movie people and a dozen other things to navigate. The hassle wasn’t worth it. I’d been born too late to fulfill my destiny.

After that final disappointment, things took an unexpected turn, both for me and for fans of the genre. In the span of a few short years, four things happened in quick succession that changed the landscape of novelization culture. Most titles went out of print within months after their initial publication, so, by the early twenty-first century, they morphed from disposable to collectible. Mass-market paperbacks I picked up for a quarter at a used bookstore in 1986 were suddenly selling for three hundred dollars or more online. Then my entire novelization collection, over eight hundred titles, was destroyed in a flood before I could begin selling them on eBay.

Then I went blind, and could neither see movies nor read novelizations anymore. In a cruel ironic twist, shortly after the moment that I knew writing novelizations was no longer an option for me, the novelization as a popular literary genre experienced a wholly unexpected and unprecedented resurgence. Suddenly, movie novelizations were topping the New York Times and Publisher’s Weekly bestseller lists, something that hadn’t happened since William Kotzwinkle’s E.T. was a bestseller in 1982. Stranger still, this new generation of novelizations almost had the veneer of respectability. Instead of ninety-five-cent paperbacks dumped on the market by genre houses like Del Ray and Signet, these new novelizations were being released as thirty-five-dollar Penguin hardcovers.

This unexpected rebirth could be explained quite simply: the rise of geek culture as a corporate demographic. The Star Trek and Star Wars franchises were fast expanding. The movie and TV industries were dominated by adaptations of superhero comics. The comics and films based on those comics were combining, cross-referencing and reflecting each other in new shared universes. Online communities of the young geeks who kept all these franchises afloat had become fixated on the minutiae and back stories they called “lore.” Fully ingesting the lore of a franchise, of hoarding every tiny detail of the Big Picture, was the only means of truly remaining in the know.

The studio flaks marketing franchises were well aware of this. They knew they had a captive audience with plenty of liquid capital, and they were anxious to exploit it. Hence the return of the novelization. In the nearly four decades since their demise as a vilified literary form of the 1980s, the very nature and function of novelizations changed dramatically. Novelizations were no longer a means of allowing audiences to re-experience, if vicariously, a film that had long since disappeared from theaters. Back then, you could pick up a novelization or opt against it depending on how much you liked a picture. Today they’re required reading for fans, even fans who weren’t enamored with the latest franchise entry. Completists now need the director’s cut of a film, all the commentaries and deleted scenes, the action figures, accompanying graphic novels and video games—and the novelizations, too.

Today, novelizations are marketed to fanbases as repositories of back stories and alternate plotlines, pitched directly at a specific demographic hungry for the trivia they couldn’t squeeze out of the movies themselves. Novelizations, in essence, moved from being substitutes to supplements. The author of a novelization could enrich a franchise’s mythology by explicating references and motivations, provide extended background material, and incorporate scenes from early unused drafts of screenplays. In short, many authorly digressions (which can be so maddening in the golden era) were now among the primary reasons a novelization was produced. Drop a throwaway line about Aquaman’s barber’s youngest nephew—the one who lives outside Dallas and works for Shell Oil—into the text, and it immediately becomes an unshakeable bit of scripture. This explains why geek-centric websites now regularly feature headlines like, “What We Learned from the Star Wars: The Last Jedi Novelization” or “How the Transformers Novelization Differs from the Film.”

It’s akin to waiting in line overnight to be among the first to snag the latest version of the iPhone. If you didn’t immediately swoop down on the latest fast-breaking tidbits of franchise lore, and if you furthermore didn’t immediately go on social media to flaunt this newfound knowledge, you run the risk of falling out of the loop, of finding yourself obsolete within hermetic fan circles. It’s almost become a form of loyalty test.

I would never see the films that inspired these new novelizations; and in some cases, I had never even heard of the films that inspired them, But I remained curious to see what this new generation was doing with the form. Thanks to adaptive technology, I could read again. So, for starters, I picked up Tim Levins’s official novelization of Kong: Skull Island (2017). It was okay. Not one for the ages, but certainly a cut above my old copy of Porky’s II. As I scanned through a list of other available titles, one familiar name kept cropping up. Yes, there he was again: Alan Dean Foster. Forty years after his heyday, the ongoing Alien, Transformers and Star Wars franchises had resurrected Mr. Foster’s career as the undisputed heavyweight champion of the novelization.

Unlike in the golden era, established and better-known authors now got the commissions to churn out these things. The prose, as a result, was a notch above what it had been in the past, but it still never aimed for anything much above a sixth-grade reading level. It was also clear that special emphasis was being placed on extraneous scenes and details and relationships which, as noted above, fed directly into franchise lore. Even having never seen the film in question, it was easy to spot these prized tidbits of extra-cinematic trivia, as if they’d been printed in bold upper caps.

Most shocking of all to me: This new generation of professional writers no longer seemed ashamed of their novelization work. Instead of hiding behind pen names or otherwise distancing themselves from the hack commissions, they were citing those titles side-by-side with their “real” books in their author bios, presumably hoping to boost the sales of their other books by associating them with their more popular work-for-hire. I found it all a bit dispiriting. The clunky, desperate, shameful, occasionally even charming innocence of the golden era of the novelization was gone, replaced by cynical exercises in marketing. Of course, this had always been the case—novelizations had been marketing tools from the start—but now there was something very transparent, crass, and sneering about the way things worked. Novelizations had once been on equal footing with lunchboxes and paint-by-numbers kits as harmless disposable marketing ploys, but now they felt like the result of story conferences and focus groups. There are stories and characters in these books, but they mostly act as covers for a data mine of trivia designed to be profitably harvested prior to relentless planned obsolescence. Call them novelizationizations. One can sometimes get the sense that this new breed of author is sublimating the old, cold mercenary approach of the corporate producers they work with, using their novelization jobs as an angle into the movie racket proper. But that’s mere speculation on my part.

For all that cynicism, this resurgence of the genre also spawned a new interest in the novelization as a form that might exist outside the constraints of mass corporate demographics. As a brief case study in counterintuitive counterprogramming, a small California-based indie publishing house has opted to buck history by placing art above commerce when it comes to novelizations. Mark Alan Miller launched Encyclopocalypse Publications in 2018. Miller, the former vice-president of horror icon Clive Barker’s production company, envisioned Encyclopocalypse as an outlet not only for new and reissued horror and dark fantasy fiction but also for new and reissued novelizations. Instead of major Hollywood blockbusters, Miller’s focus from the start has been resting squarely on forgotten cult films from the 1970s and 1980s. To date, Encyclopocalypse has published novelizations of, among many others, Circus of the Dead (Billy ‘Bloody Bill’ Pon, 2014), Blue Sunshine (Jeff Lieberman, 1977), the Italian Jaws knockoff Cruel Jaws (Bruno Mattei, 1995), Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979), and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! (John De Bello, 1978).

These were the sorts of movies I wanted to novelize when I had dreams of becoming a professional movie novelizer. If the source material is oddball, over-the-top, and off the mainstream map, it makes the writing more freewheeling and fun. Having readers who are familiar with cult films also affords authors the freedom to drop in occasional nudges and winks for fans, as all the involved parties are in on the joke. Given the films in question are forty or fifty years old, publicity is no longer an issue, allowing Miller to release them as stand-alone publications to be enjoyed as legitimate books, and not as disposable corporate afterthoughts.

In the public consciousness, novelizations will likely remain the seedy roadside carnival of literature, ranking even lower in its cultural respectability than the Western, or romance, or furthermore, science-fiction and crime pulps of the mid-twentieth century. Seventy years ago, crime pulp novels in particular were likewise dismissed as a gutter genre aimed at degenerates. Then, in the mid-1960s, they were rediscovered and rehabilitated by French cultural critics, in tandem with the rediscovery of the noir films that many of them had inspired. Hardboiled pulp novelists like David Goodis, Horace McCoy, and Jim Thompson were suddenly being hailed as brilliant and brutal stylists who captured and reflected the often-ignored downbeat spirit of postwar America. Will future critics one day hail the genius of Alan Dean Foster, or cite the novelization genre as the ultimate camp expression of the postmodern condition? I doubt it, but who knows? Bad as they can be in literary terms, and kitschy as they can be as pop-cultural artifacts, they at least come by their kitschiness honestly, like the films of Ray Dennis Steckler or W. Lee Wilder. Like those too often forgotten and guileless filmmakers, they reflect their own time and place in a uniquely awkward way.

Film Quarterly expresses gratitude to Mark Alan Miller and Encyclopocalypse Publications for permission to reprint the novelization book covers that illustrate this article.