LIGHT INTO INK: A CRITICAL SURVEY OF 50 FILM NOVELIZATIONS / AUTHOR: S.M. GUARIENTO / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Most cinema fans of a certain age will look back fondly on movie novelisations (or ‘movie tie-ins’, as they were more popularly known) even though they tended to get a fairly bad rap from the literary establishment. In the days before home video, a novelisation of your favourite film was the closest you’d get to taking the movie home with you. If you were lucky, it was also a way to draw a little more detail from the story you’d just seen on the big screen, so you could thumb through the pages and relive your favourite sequences over and over and over again. However, most tie-ins were so rapidly written to meet the deadline of a movie’s release date that they rarely had any literary merit. The prose was clunky and littered with typos and, because the tie-ins were often based on an early screenplay draft and not on the finished product, they sometimes took surprising and frustrating narrative detours the devoted film fan wasn’t expecting. In some cases, whole chunks of the plot (and even the climax) were substantially different. It’s easy to see why ‘serious’ publishers and readers got so snotty about them, even though this showed that they were completely missing the point. The point is, movie tie-ins were more than a typeset reproduction of images on celluloid, they had a style and charm all their own and that’s why so many of us miss them. That’s what makes S.M. Guariento’s new book, Light into Ink: A Critical Survey of 50 Film Novelizations so special. If you’re a movie tie-in aficionado who’s looking for a nostalgia overload, this is it.
Over 480 tightly-packed and richly illustrated pages, Guariento explores the complete scope of the movie and TV tie-in genre (yes, he touches on the early Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Space: 1999 novelisations as well.) He analyses fifty examples of the form in fascinating detail (even if you’re not familiar with the movies, the genesis of these novelisations makes for a compelling read) and also includes extensive extracts from the novels themselves, several of which have been translated into English for the first time (fans of Argento’s ‘Suspiria’ have got a delightful surprise in store.) There’s something here for everyone, with chapters covering everything from Forbidden Planet, The Omen, and Dawn of the Dead to forgotten gems like The Last Wave and A Quiet Place in the Country, to Taxi Driver, Mad Max, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Guariento also includes an eye-opening analysis of novels based on the films of David Cronenberg and John Carpenter. His deconstructions of The Thing, Halloween III, and Eyes of Laura Mars are especially interesting.
Guariento’s passion for the genre shines through and, although it’s an exhaustive, scholarly study, it’s written for everybody to enjoy. If you’ve ever been captivated by the movie tie-in format, or if you’ve ever wondered why its appeal continues to be so enduring, Light into Ink will answer all your questions and more.
