complete order
Book
Poltergeist II
Buy on AmazonBuy on BackInTimeRareBooks
Spielberg was no longer associated with this sequel, I think. I was brought on board by the original writers of the first film, Mark Victor and Michael Grais, who were now producing this film as well, because they liked my first book so much. This one expands on some of the themes I opened in the original novelization. It’s a thinner book, but, I think, underappreciated.
RobertoFrippenzo –
I loved both Poltergeist novels. I first read the first novelization as a VERY young 11 or 12-year-old, having seen the movie theatrically at age 10 in 1982 and being ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED.
I literally was up for a week each night, sleeping for like an hour or two at a time, then staying up the rest of the time.
It scared me that much.
I was hoping that the novelization would be just as hair-raising, but it turned out to be more cerebral, centering in more upon the inner psychological dimension to the protagonists’ experience.
I had trouble sticking to the novel because it all seemed like a dream-sequence, much of the content of which seemed superfluous and irrelevant to the main body of the story itself, told so powerfully on screen. And trying to keep track of all of the, shall I say inhuman, characters and their actions was challenging.
But as I grew older, however, but not necessarily too much wiser ha!, and had read quite a bit more over those years, I now appreciate that a much richer, though perhaps darker and more complex, film could have come out of such a novel.
Some of my earlier assumptions about the novel were shattered when I read that the novelization was written so late into the production, so most of what’s in there would never have been part of the script in the first place and is an extrapolation created far later.
Good novels, both of them, for sure though.