Back in 1988, director William Lustig and late, great screenwriter Larry Cohen joined forces to bring us the awesome slasher movie Maniac Cop. They made a follow-up two years later, and Maniac Cop 2 is one of the rare horror sequels that’s generally considered to be even better than its predecessor. Things got questionable with 1993’s troubled Maniac Cop 3, where Cohen’s script received extensive rewrites from producer Joel Soisson and Lustig was so disinterested in the whole thing that he took his name off the movie. But now, Lustig has teamed up with author Christian Francis for novelizations of each film in the Maniac Cop trilogy – and those three books have all been released today!
The Maniac Cop novelization is available at THIS LINK and has the following description: In the heart of New York City, innocent people are being slaughtered in cold blood-by someone wearing a police uniform. As fear grips the streets, rookie officer Jack Forrest becomes the prime suspect after the brutal murder of his own wife. But Jack isn’t the killer… and the real threat is far more terrifying. Lieutenant Frank McCrae’s investigation uncovers a horrifying truth: a relentless, inhuman force is stalking the city-a man once sworn to serve and protect, now back from the grave and out for blood. As the body count rises and the department closes ranks, McCrae and Forrest must race to uncover the secret behind the badge before the city is drowned in its own blood.
The Maniac Cop 2 novelization is available HERE in paperback and HERE in Kindle edition. The description: The Maniac Cop is back from the dead and stalking the streets of New York once more. Officer Matt Cordell was once a hero, but after being framed by corrupt superiors and brutally assaulted in prison, he sets out on a macabre mission of vengeance, teaming up with a vicious serial killer to track down those who wronged him and make them pay… with their lives!
With those two novelizations, we get the entertainment of reading novels that are directly based on Cohen’s original screenplays, so things don’t play out in exactly the same way we see them on the screen. Nearly every act of violence is enhanced in the books, while some stunts Lustig and his crew came up with on set aren’t on the page. (So, for example, the killer reaches a different end in the Maniac Cop novelization than he does in the film.)
The Maniac Cop 3 novelization is interesting in a completely different way, because it happens to be based on the script Cohen wrote for the film before the producers rewrote the story and swapped out characters. The paperback can be purchased HERE and the Kindle edition HERE. The description: In the heart of the decaying Lower East Side, Officer Teresa Mallory lies in a coma, her body shattered. She should be dead… but something won’t let her go. Meanwhile, Detective Lieutenant Stan Moonjean doesn’t believe in ghosts, until the bodies start piling up again. The signs all point to the Maniac Cop, back from the dead once more!
The three books have also been put together in a single collection, and that’s available at THIS LINK.
I got an early look at these books – I already read through Maniac Cop and Maniac Cop 2, and am exactly halfway through Maniac Cop 3 – and I have really enjoyed them. I’m a big fan of the Maniac Cop movies and of the concept of novelizations, so it has been fun to see how the story of Matt Cordell plays out in novel form.
Will you be adding the Maniac Cop trilogy novelizations to your collection? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
