What's with this anyways? Film novelizations are something that is usually done by a starving beginner anxious to hone his professional skills or an established writer under a pseudonym. In fact one author told me that no writer should do novelizations as publishing companies look down on them as hacks and do not take them seriously. Which is probably why many writers use pseudonyms on their novelizations such as Jack Martin for Dennis Etchison and Carl Dreadstone for Ramsey Campbell.Yet here we have not just an established writer but one of the greats in modern horror writing a film novelization under his real name for the Twilight Zone movie. And it wasn't a very good movie. Two of the stories were originally done on the TV series and were based on stories by Richard Matheson and Jerome Bixby. The actual screenplay for the movie was written by Bloch's illustrious colleague, Richard Matheson. Yet now Bloch rewrites them into this questionable and unnecessary novelization and adds nothing to it. They are well written . Bloch could not write crap. But they are ...again...unnecessary. I'm sure there are legal and commercial reasons for this travesty but sometimes, for art's sake, you just gotta pass. Which is what Bloch should have done.
