One of my many ongoing obsessions is collecting movie novelizations/tie-ins – especially the novelizations for horror/trash films, like the Friday the 13th series (can you believe they wrote a tie-in for Part 6?!), 1980s movies (like Gremlins, The Goonies), etc.

One of my favorite things about movie novelizations is how the book will go into more detail about certain events/characters and will often include things that weren’t in the final film (or will even include events that occured in deleted scenes). I also like when there is a different ending provided, or even epilogues. For example, in The Goonies book, there is an epilogue that accounts for the activities of the kids after the movie…for example, a whole thing about Sloth getting a Bar Mitzvah since he’s adopted by Chunk’s family! Also, in the tie-in book for Clue, there was an actual fourth ending (not seen in the film) which has features an odd, gruesome demise for Tim Curry’s character!

I love finding these weird little bits of additional information on my favorite movies…it almost makes ME want to write some additional chapters for the films I love.

The crown jewel of my collection has to be the novelization of the brain-damaged horror film, THE PIT, under it’s alternate title of TEDDY. This book goes much more in depth with the little boy and his ominous teddy bear.

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What are some totally crazy movie novelizations you have seen (or own)? Anyone know of some particularly odd or strange movie novelization moments that add a new twist or perspective on the film?

That novelization of FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 6 has some nice bits and some terrible, terrible writing but is noteworthy for having an appended ending that reads as cool and could have made the series move in an interesting direction. I always wondered if it was the author's invention or part of an early draft of the script.

I'm sure everyone knows about the HALLOWEEN novelization and its variations of details on the story by now.

I read the novelization of HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH at the time but don't remember much about it except for some digustingly detailed descriptions of the effects of the robots trying to rip the guy's face off like a mask. Also, the kid's "death by mask" scene was pretty intense in written form and, IIRC, did a better job of explaining what was actually happening with the masks (again IIRC - the chips of stone were opening a dimensional portal in the mask-wearer's head through which poured all the nasties).

The VIDEODROME novelization was workmanlike but did have some nice riffs on the hallucinations Max was undergoing.

I've never read the novelization of THE FOG but would like to, as it possibly could use the extra space to explain the gaping logical flaws in one of my favorite movies.

The novelization of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK has the background story on how Plissken lost his eye (he was flying a jet and crashed in a toxic gas; the gas leaked into his cracked goggles). It also has a scene where Plissken is in a medical room where he is to be made sterile before being sent to island. Hauk saves him in the nick of time.

There are two totally different novelizations of THE TERMINATOR: one American, one British...and I understand the British one reads like a hardcore sex novel!

In the COFFY novelization, it's revealed that Coffy's birth name is Flower Child Coffin (!). I thought this was the author's own wacky sense of humor, but then I noticed it in Jack Hill's BURN, COFFY, BURN screenplay years later (before that was rewritten as FOXY BROWN) and was surprised to see it was Hill's doing.

The novelization of DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE includes one of the alternate endings, which involves a game of "spin the rocket launcher" between Willis and Irons!

The TAXI DRIVER novelization is a creepy one, written first-person from Travis' point of view.

The ROCKY II novelization (written by Sylvester Stallone) is first-person from Rocky's point of view.

The NATURAL BORN KILLERS novelization is written in the style of a true crime paperback.

The novelization of Walter Hill's LAST MAN STANDING was adapted from an early draft, with one additional subplot pulled directly from YOJIMBO and the bartender/sidekick character (played by William Sanderson in the movie) written as a middle-aged woman.

The novelization of Tim Burton's BATMAN includes the horseback chase scene that led to Sean Young's injury and departure from the production.

The go-to guys for novelizations/movie tie-ins are Michael Gingold, Chris Poggiali and Darrin Venticinque. Those three have mind-boggling collections, and they've been compiling a reference book on the subject for a number of years. Chris has been posting covers of the rarer ones on DVD Maniacs lately (like last week, when Lee Frost's death was reported, Chris was quick to add THE ANIMAL and BLACK GESTAPO book covers to the thread).

I have a soft spot for Christopher Wood's movie tie-in novel for the THE SPY WHO LOVED ME. It is most unique in that it sincerely attempts to stylistically bridge the world of Ian Fleming's literary 007 with that of the summer of 0077's Roger Moore cinema extravaganza. Add it to your summer reading list for extra credit!

I don't know who wrote it, but the novelization for The Dark made it sound as if it was going to be a pretty cool movie until something horribly wrong happened... I seem to recall someone here making the connection that it was the unexpectedly popularity of Star Wars, what with the zombie suddenly becoming an alien that could shoot laser beams from it's eyes.

The novelization of APRIL FOOL'S DAY goes on for another hundred pages or so after the point where the movie ends.

The novelization of NEW YORK, NEW YORK, written by the original screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch, is extremely interesting, since it's based on Rauch's first draft, which was rewritten by Scorsese and Mardik Martin. The book has a different narrative, a different ending, different character names, and literary ambitions way beyond those of most novelizations.

I haven't read it, but I understand that the JAWS II novelization was based on an early draft which bears little resemblance to the final film.

Another one I haven't read (though I do have a copy) is Dean Koontz's novelization of Tobe Hooper's THE FUNHOUSE. Apparently, the first two thirds are entirely Koontz's invention, with the final third retelling the story of the film.

THE FOG: I used to own this one, but don't recall much more logic to the episodic happenings - although I do clearly remember that the entire sequence featuring the "Dr Phibes" character (where the corpse reanimates and scrawls a gnomic clue on the mortuary floor) was not present in the novel.

JAWS 2 - Yep, the novel bears little resemblance to the film (be grateful for small blessings) but I think the demise of the female shark is the same (biting through a power cable?).

I recall even having a novelization for FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3 IN 3D! Kind of wish they'd altered the title to fit the medium (FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3 IN 2D!) but if wishes were horses...

The most stylistically original novelization I ever read was for Ken Annakin's MONTE CARLO OR BUST, almost Joycean in its eagerness to embrace the experimental: split-screen sequences divided on opposite sides of the same page, sections rendered in script form, even complex flow charts to explain the relative positions of rival competitors...wish I still had this (it vanished during my early teens, no doubt ferried off the the local charity shop by my mother).

I also enjoyed Christopher Wood's novel tie-ins for his two Bond movies, JAMES BOND, THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and JAMES BOND AND MOONRAKER (to give them their full titles) - very straight, serious stuff in comparison with the camped-up silliness of the film versions. (I vividly recall a sequence in SPY where Agent XXX supervises a torture session with Bond, where Russian villains electrocute Bond's testicles - definitely NOT in the film!) SPY presumably represents an early script draft, as character names are slightly different (Sigmund rather than Karl Stromberg, Anya Amatsova rather than Amasova) and an interesting backstory for Jaws (including his real name).

ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES and CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES I remeber as two particularly fine novelizations, the latter particularly so as it represents the original, brutally violent version of the film before studio heads wet their knickers and forced J.Lee Thompson to reshoot the violent sequences and completely soften the ending. Unless the uncut Japanese version of CONQUEST surfaces on DVD in the near future, this is the closest we'll get to the real deal.

Alas, I had an attack of literary snobbery during my early 20s and turned my back on this fascinating little offshoot of the film world (probably Woody Allen's fault, ridiculing Diane Keaton's novelization sub-career in MANHATTAN), although I have since picked up a couple of other titles I'd always wanted way back when (part of my ongoing mid-lfe crisis, no doubt). I have a horrible need to read the US tie-in for BRIDES OF DRACULA, which apparently is a full-on sex novel (rather like the UK TERMINATOR novel, which I also once owned - awful though it was)...

During my college years my writing teacher, poet laureate Stephen Dunn, told me that a friend of his (I don't know if this was a friend or "a friend"), who was a "literary figure", ghosted some SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT novelizations for rent money...

In my very early teens I sublimated my desire to see the R-rated Hammer films coming out at that time by reading Angus Hall's and Michel Parry's Beagle Books novelizations, SCARS OF and COUNTESS DRACULA, particularly. On finally catching up with them on video a decade or two later, I was impressed to learn that even though that wasn't my primary interest the sex was actually more explicit in the prose than in the celluloid versions, an irony my parents would have appreciated had they ever found out. I also remember the CAT O' NINE TAILS adaptation raising my eyebrows a bit. Okay, a lot.

What is it, out of curiosity?

An oldie: I haven't looked at it in ages so I'm not sure how it compares to the film, but I have an old novelization of the Archers' A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, with pictures, from the '40s.

"Mysterious visitor" ™ who has been hanging around town, an older man with piercing eyes, is revealed to be Jason's long missing father. His mere presence terrorizes the gravedigger and Pop Vorhees can tell at a glance that the filled in grave of his son does not contain the actual body ('cause Horseshack's in there, natch), which angers him. The wind rises and the surface of Crystal Lake is disuturbed....

Then there's Bernardino Zapponi's novelization of Fellini's CASANOVA, in which Casanova himself keeps interrupting the narative to conduct a running argument with Fellini:

GIACOMO CASANOVA (breaking in): One moment, Signor Fellini! There was never any bird in my MEMOIRES. How can you put such an obvious lie in your film?

FEDERICO FELLINI (mumbling): But the symbolism...I thought it would be good to put in this leitmotif of the golden bird which stands for -

CASANOVA: I know very well what it stands for. But in my day no one talked about phallic symbols. Freud wasn't born yet, and neither was Kraft-Ebbing. Well, then?

FELLINI (timidly): De Sade was, though.

CASANOVA: All right, go on.

GREMLINS was briefly mentioned way above. It's been a long time but I have a vague recollection of it going into detail about the history of the Mogwai, implying they had come from another planet.

The STAR TREK novelizations that I read back in the day each expanded on the movies considerably (no surprise, being STAR TREK and all) with THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK not picking up where the movie began until 80 or so pages in.

The novelization for HOWARD THE DUCK read as if the writer was making an attempt to approximate an oddball point of view that would have been consistent with the tone of the comic...but, again, it's been a long time.

SUPERMAN IV was some sort of Scholastic pre-teen thing and I was too old for it, but I read it anyway because I was curious about everything that was missing. It at least gave the impression that it could have been a coherent movie, if not a good one.

You're right about that -- I read the novelization prior to the movie coming out, and it read to me like the author was trying to take a very HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY-esque approach to the material. I remember being extremely disappointed when the film came out -- not just because it was such a lousy take on Steve Gerber's creation, but because it wasn't nearly as good or as inventive as the novelization.

I think Gene Roddenberry is the credited author of the STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE novelization, but he probably didn't write it, did he (I'm betting on Alan Dean Foster)? It helped my 12-year-old mind better understand what the hell was going on at the end. It also established that Will Decker was the son of William Windom's Commodore Matt Decker from "The Doomsday Machine."

Vonda McIntyre's STAR TREK II novelization is where I first learned that the dead ensign played in the film by Ike Eisenmann was Scotty's nephew. That footage was shot but cut from the theatrical version, but was later added for television broadcasts (and I think it's on the DVD?).

I remember doing a book report on SUDDEN IMPACT when I was in high school.

There is no stand-alone novelization of PLANET OF THE APES. (They simply slapped some movie photos on the cover of Pierre Boulle's substantially different original novel.) So the first couple of chapters of Michael Avallone's novelization of BENEATH TPOTA include a full recap of POTA, rather than beginning with just POTA's end as the movie does.

Robin Hardy's novelization of THE WICKER MAN (which was published in 1978, 5 years after the film's release) contains a lot of additional background information, and makes Howie seem far more sympathetic and intelligent.

It's also worth noting that the great Jim Thompson wrote a number of novelizations, including one of Micheal Roemer's excellent NOTHING BUT A MAN. He even novelized an episode (or maybe it was the pilot) of IRONSIDE - apparently, Thompson specialists rate that one quite highly.

-I read and loved the Alan Dean Foster-ghostwritten novelization of STAR WARS years before I ever got to see the film and ended up disappointed that my favorite parts from the book were nowhere on the screen. To this day the film feels to me like a group of not entirely commited actors running through the main parts of the book as quickly as possible(a fan-intensive listing of the differences between the two can be found at this SW blog).
-The novelization of NETWORK has Howard Beale crediting Christine Chubbuck with the inspiration for his impending on-air suicide, making explicit a connection that most would likely have assumed anyway.

David Gerrold's adaptation for BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES set me up to be seriously disappointed... the final film looked like it was shot on the abandoned set of BONANZA with a handful of extras.

How about those quickie novels based on television series? These were usually new stories, rather than novelizations of episodes (though there were some). It seems like nearly every reasonably popular show of the 60s and 70s got novels. There were a couple of dozen based on THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. and five or six based on I SPY (which are more hard-boiled than the series and are missing the characters' trademark repartee). I read the PARTRIDGE FAMILY books as a kid, which often found the sitcom family solving mysteries. James Blish's STAR TREK novelizations were based on early drafts of the scripts, which were sometimes quite different. I particularly got into Alan Dean Foster's novelizations of the STAR TREK animated series, which took 25-minute episodes and fleshed them out into feature length. I still have books based on MANNIX, THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, DALLAS and many more.

Of course, there also were those Whitman hardcovers and thousands of comic books based on movies and TV shows. This thread could run forever!

Jim Thompson's IRONSIDE tie-in is an original story by Thompson, and is not based on any episodes of the show. It's also the only true "mystery" that Thompson wrote.

The other movie novelization written by Thompson is THE UNDEFEATED.

I'm a big fan of the DARK SHADOWS novels, which are often quite beautifully written. I've never actually seen an episode of the TV series - though that's something I have in common with the guy who wrote the books (under the pseudonym 'Marilyn Ross'), since he lived in Canada, where DARK SHADOWS wasn't shown!

There's a thread about this series (including my review of BARNABAS COLLINS VERSUS THE WARLOCK) on the British Horror Anthology Hell website:

http://vaultofevil.suddenlaunch3.com/index...&num=1132862210

oh, now, TV paperbacks....

I thank the ADDAMS FAMILY paperback for finally explaining what "Thing" was supposed to be (a solid-form poltergeist).

Two years ago I picked up an old DRAGNET novel (the second one, I think) but haven't read it yet. I do remember opening to a page at random and reading a line of narration from Friday in which he mentions his hands were sweating. My God! It's not that I never imagined Joe Friday sweating, it's just that I never wanted him to tell me about it....

(much like my reaction to a radio drama of THE AVENGERS - "From Venus, With Love" IIRC - done for South African radio at the time of the show. The narrator said something like "Steed was thinking about Mrs. Peel and worried she might be in trouble" and I yelled out "I don't want to know what Steed is thinking! That's why he's cool!"

And I loved the way those DARK SHADOWS novels *looked* - coppery bronze with a photo, very cool.

Fritz Leiber's TARZAN AND THE VALLEY OF GOLD is considered to be a minor classic of novelizations. I was much impressed by it when I was in my late teens and an even bigger fan of Ian Fleming and Leiber himself than I was of Burroughs (whom I'd grown up reading but had somewhat grown out of at that point). Leiber takes his cue from the Bondian elements of the film and turns it into a full-on Fleming homage, doing a better job of it than John Gardner (the "Boysie Oaks" author, not the GRENDEL guy) did with his authorized continuation of the series. Leiber makes the villain more bizarre and perverted, with a thoroughly Flemingesque back story, and makes Don Megowan's hulking, karate chopping henchman a genuinely interesting character. He also explains why Tarzan knows karate. Even the heroine is fleshed out the way that some of Fleming's better ones were (like them, she's a bit of a "wounded thrush").

Wasn't A STUDY IN TERROR novelized by "Ellery Queen" (I don't know if it was Theodore Sturgeon, but it was one of the latter ghosts and I know that Sturgeon did several at that time), with Queen solving the mystery in modern times based on Holmes' (or, I assume, Watson's) account of the unsolved case?

What about those novelizations of classic Universal horror films that some publisher did in the late 70s or early 80s? They were credited, I believe, to "Carl Dreadstone." Ramsey Campbell wrote the WOLF MAN and DRACULA'S DAUGHTER ones, which were pretty faithful to the films, albeit with Campbellesque touches (the fur standing up on Larry Talbott's head makes it seem grotesquely large -- Campbell is fond of monsters with grotesquely inflated heads). The others were bizarre and incoherent. THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON is a giant creature that bears no resemblence to the beloved gillman, and even has some pig-like features. At the end, it's blown apart and it's disembodied eye (!) floats to the surface. THE WEREWOLF OF LONDON somehow involves a Yeti early on.

I consider Vonda McIntyre's STAR TREK II novelization to be one of the best of its kind. It goes into great detail in several areas, including a positively chilling and emotionally draining look into the slaughter at the Regula One Space Station.

McIntyre did a good job on STAR TREK III but she was handicapped by having to work with considerably weaker screenplay material than with II.

Somewhere, I have Sam Fuller's novelization of THE NAKED KISS, which might have some interesting material in it. The book's cover resembles an adults-only paperback, which it may well have been.

There was a whole series of paperbacks in the early sixties that added sexual innuendo to novelizations of such genre films as BRIDES OF DRACULA, and possibly even GORGO?

The book THE ABYSS adds quite a bit of detail, including a whole chapter on the film's villain, Coffy (played by Michael Biehn in the film). Coffy was a high achieving cadet at West Point, if memory serves.

WEST SIDE STORY was novelized by Irving Shulman, who'd written a celebrated Brooklyn street gang novel back in the 1940s called "The Amboy Dukes," which was made into a movie called CITY ACROSS THE RIVER (1949) starring a young Tony Curtis. If you took all the songs and dancing out of WEST SIDE STORY, what do you get? A gang novel! And that's what it was, with added cursing and sexual innuendo and such. Quite a heady read for a ten-year-old.

Yes, GORGO, KONGA and REPTILLICUS were given "adults-only" novelizations, with the human characters (sadly, not the monsters) having lots of sex. REPTILLICUS contains the immortal line "He impaled her on the savage lance of his manhood."

Are we all so blase that it doesn't sink in how WEIRD it is that there's a novelization for Friday the 13th Part 6?

I picked up a Michael Avallone novelization of I think Man from UNCLE as a joke gift for a friend and the first few pages were so clumsy/funny that I almost kept it.

What about comic book adaptations? The 1941 adaptation has a cult reputation but is hard to find. Supposedly Alien (not the follow-up stories) is solid as well. Not adaptations but I have several of DC's Jerry Lewis series and they're frequently oddball enough that I wish they hadn't disappeared into collector purgatory.

I dunno... it's hard to out-weird the novelization of a musical.