Rejoice, the novelization is back from the dead.

Sometime during the first year or two after I started writing for New York Press, I did a small piece about my movie novelization collection (I'm guessing that not much had happened that week). I'd been collecting them since I was very young?during what had been a golden age of novelizations, when movies like Squirm and The Car were novelized without question and placed in drugstore racks. At present, I have several hundred volumes stacked on shelves and packed away in boxes around my apartment. Some of them are actually worth something, at least to a certain small and reasonably pathetic subsection of the population.

It was a goofy little story about why I was attracted to the novelization as a literary form. No big deal, and quickly forgotten. It did, however, lead to the addition of several more volumes to my collection?including the novelizations of Martin and Dawn of the Dead, sent to me out of the blue by Richard Rubenstein, the man who produced both films.

Since the dream, of course, was to write these things myself, I closed my thank-you note to him by asking if he needed anyone to write novelizations for his more recent or upcoming film projects. A few weeks later, I received a flat "no" in response. I wasn't much surprised. Apart from Star Trek and similar franchises, by the time you hit the 1990s, the market for novelizations was long dead. With videotapes (and now DVDs), who the hell needed novelizations anymore?

Still, I persisted. Look at William Kotzwinkle?the man writes dozens of serious, literary novels, but what's his claim to fame? The fact that he wrote the E.T. novelization, which sold millions upon millions of copies.

With that in mind, I approached my agent and, in all seriousness, told her, "What I really want to do is write movie novelizations." She's a wonderful and smart person, and it took a bit to convince her that I wasn't joking. Once I'd done that, and though she had her doubts, she approached my publisher at the time. He said that he'd like to help me out, but had to admit that there was absolutely no market for such things anymore.

I guess I knew as much, just as I'd known as much a decade earlier, when I received that letter from Richard Rubenstein. Still, a man's gotta have a dream, right? I realize that these things are a tricky business strictly from a legal standpoint, what with ancillary rights and contracts and copyrights and movie people and a dozen other things to consider. I realized that there was no viable market for these things, except among terminal geeks and those people who didn't have VCRs or DVD players or cable. Maybe in Guam, I thought. Maybe they're still a viable literary form in Guam. Or Papua New Guinea.

The discussion with my agent and the editor took place within the past year. Afterwards, we never spoke of it again. But still?though of course I would do other things in the meantime?deep in my heart, I wanted to write a novelization. Just one.

Then only yesterday?I forget exactly how I came across this, but I did?I saw a notice for the upcoming release of Freddy vs. Jason, the modern-day equivalent of the old Dracula vs. Frankenstein films. What's more, I saw a notice for the Freddy vs. Jason novelization.

A new novelization? Of a horror film? Such a thing had been all but unheard of since the mid-80s.

Then I discovered that the author of Freddy vs. Jason was also about to release his novelization of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I nearly wept. Both were by a fellow named Stephen Hand, and both were being released by Simon & Schuster. Given the recent devastating and ongoing slump in the publishing business, the fact that a major house was releasing something in a supposedly dead genre had to be a sign of something.

A little more poking around revealed that all the recent comic-book movies had likewise led to novelizations?Daredevil, The Hulk, X-Men. Not only was there a Terminator 3 novelization, but Terminator 2 had spawned a cheap, mass-market paperback series all its own.

I'd stopped actively seeking out novelizations years ago. If I came across something I didn't have and it cost less than a dollar, I picked it up. Some things had come across my desk at the paper?lots of action/adventure films and the occasional, odd video-game novelization?but those had since dried up. Even the rare indie hipster movie got the novelization treatment (like 200 Cigarettes, by the mysterious Spencer Johns), though I'm not sure why that was.

Now, however, we seemed to be on the verge of a new golden age of quickly produced, sloppily written books based on the cheapest of horror films (hell, I think I still have a C.H.U.D. novelization around someplace)?as well as old favorites like TCM?and I don't know what to think about this. Is it a good thing, something I should be thrilled about, or had I, yet again, completely missed the boat?

Around the time I first started gathering these things, some publisher or another released a series of "Classic Monster" novelizations?Creature from the Black Lagoon, Werewolf of London, King Kong?the latter being the only one I still have around. Maybe it's time for a new series, based on films that were never novelized when they were new?like The Dark, or The Night God Screamed. I sat down and started doing some hopeless plotting. People will want them, I thought. Yes, they will.

Some dreams, I must admit, are really, really stupid.