Movie tie-in fans are rejoicing: We’re living in a new Golden Age of cult and classic horror novelizations. Any number of paperback adaptations of films that never got such print counterparts when they first came out have been issued recently by Encyclopocalypse, Echo On Publications, Severin Films, etc.

This month, one has arrived all the way from France: Maniac, the first simultaneous publication in English and French by Editions Faute de frappe. The prose translation of William Lustig’s notorious 1981 shocker was written by Stéphane Bourgoin and is now available in hardcover, paperback and Kindle via Amazon.com.

This is the latest novelization to emerge from the Compact label of Editions Faute de frappe, which was founded by Marc Falvo, himself the author of 20 novels. Previously, the publisher issued new French translations of books like Night of the Living Dead and Wishmaster (with Re-Animator and Cruel Jaws coming soon) and original entries in favorite franchises such as Destination Amityville and the Nightmare on Elm Street tribute Bloody Glove.

“I was checking my DVD collection during fall 2023,” Falvo recalls, “looking for potential cult films that hadn’t been adapted yet, and Maniac caught my eye. I thought, ‘There isn’t any novelization of this yet—what a scandal!’ For a little while, I was pursuing Dolls, the Stuart Gordon film I’m a big fan of, but I haven’t managed to reach Charles Band. Then one day, Mr. Bill Lustig himself finally answered my e-mails, and we started talking.”

There actually was a prior Maniac novelization, written in the ’80s by Richard Vetere, screenwriter of Lustig’s 1983 film Vigilante. For various reasons, that book has remained unpublished, and Falvo says, “Bill talked to me about it, even offered to let me read it, but the original manuscript was stored in a warehouse somewhere, and over time we moved on. I preferred instead to work with a new author from a fresh point of view, and I think that’s for the best. But, as a big fan of Maniac, I’m still eager to discover this version one day.”

Falvo first discovered the Joe Spinell-starrer at the tender age of 12. “I know, that’s rather young, but my dad was a video store owner and I had access to lots of movies of all genres. Like all teenagers, I was mainly attracted to those I wasn’t allowed to see. Maniac was a real shock, and every time I saw it after that—at 15, 20 or 30 years old, even when I saw it again last year for the novelization project—it was still a shock. Maniac punches you in the face: The atmosphere, the music, the crimes, not to mention Joe Spinell’s character and performance. It has what many horror movies lack: a soul. OK, it’s a twisted one, darker than the dark itself, but that soul will haunt you forever.”

To bring that dark soul to the page, Falvo chose Bourgoin, whose 92 (!) previous tomes range from studies of directors like Roger Corman, Terence Fisher, and Richard Fleischer to numerous books on true crime, largely serial killers—making him uniquely suited to this job. “I interviewed a dozen of those murderers in the U.S. and South Africa,” Bourgoin says, “like Ed Kemper, Gerard John Schaefer, Ottis Toole, Donald Harvey, Elmer Wayne Henley, Tommy Lynn Sells, Brian Rosenfeld, Stewart Wilken, etc. I visited death rows and high-security jails in Texas, Florida, California, Ohio and New York, and also met with local investigators and traveled to crime scenes as well as the FBI in Quantico. I have also made more than 40 documentaries for French TV.”

“I knew Stéphane before, and his contributions to the true crime genre,” Falvo says, “though he had never published a work of fiction. But like Maniac in my DVD collection, his name caught my eye on the front of a bookshelf, and I immediately thought it would be a good idea to work with him on this. The movie would bring the story and mood, and Stéphane would bring all the psychological background, all his practical expertise on serial killers.”

When it came to putting Spinell’s Frank Zito and his bloody rampage across New York City to the page, Bourgoin says, “I wanted to give more background to Frank’s character and what makes him tick, and an in-depth description of his place based on my knowledge of serial killers. I am also very familiar with New York City, where I lived for quite a few years in the ’70s, going to theaters playing triple bills on 42nd Street and walking all around the city.” As for the murders, “My descriptions are at least as gory as in the movie. It’s very faithful!”

Unlike a number of modern genre novelizations of past favorites, Bourgoin’s Maniac doesn’t add new characters—or killings—to the scenario. “That didn’t seem useful to us,” Falvo notes. “On the other hand, we are told a lot about Frank Zito’s youth—his complicated relationship with his mother, which is barely mentioned in the film, his adolescence, his military service and his first criminal offenses. The whole journey that led him to become the psychotic killer we see in the film. In the original movie, Spinell brings all of that with just his pockmarked face. His whole story is contained in that face, but in a book, we thought it should be told in a different way.”

Bourgoin didn’t consult with Lustig while writing Maniac, though he and Falvo had the filmmaker’s approval for the changes they wanted to make. They sent him a first draft of the book last summer, and evidently, Lustig approved, as he contributed a foreword. “He really left it up to us to create our own version of his story,” Falvo says, “and I truly thank him for that.”

With Maniac now available, Falvo is currently in negotiations to bring several more fright favorites to the printed realm, but doesn’t want to say anything more before the deals are sealed. Bourgoin, however, knows one film he’d love to adapt: “I would be glad to try and do a novelization of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which I consider a masterpiece!”