Daniel (@dungeondive) takes us on a nostalgic tour through his collection of movie novelizations—those literary artefacts that critics have long dismissed as ‘hack work’ but which served a glorious purpose before the age of home video. Want to revisit that R-rated film you were too young to see? Check it out from the library. Want to experience the movie again before VHS existed? Crack open the paperback with the colour photos stuck in the middle.
The shelves groan with Alan Dean Foster (the undisputed king of the form), James Kahn’s brilliant Poltergeist novelization (which Daniel insists is better than his favourite film), and oddities like Pierce Anthony’s Total Recall—a movie based on a short story that became a novel based on the film. Foster famously wrote the Alien novelization without knowing what the xenomorph looked like. Buckaroo Banzai’s novelization includes footnotes referencing adventures that never existed. And yes, Tarantino wrote his own novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in mass-market paperback format, because of course he did.
What’s your holy grail novelization—the one that’s either impossibly expensive or impossibly better than the film?