An casual visit to a remainder store yesterday resulted in some Kingly finds. One was a copy of Russell Blackford’s Kong Reborn, a sequel to the original King Kong film. Blackford is an excellent genre writer and I was glad to find this book, which has hitherto eluded my grasp.
The other find was also Kong-related: a newish edition of Delos W. Lovelace’s novelisation of the 1933 film, first published in 1932 and thus one of the first examples of a film tie-in novel. I already have a copy of the novel, which was closely based on Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper’s original story. In fact I’ve had that copy since the 1960s. So why buy another, you may ask? Well, it only cost me $2 and I loved the cover — a superbly rendered image of the Ape King.
The book contains other rather spectacular full-colour illustrations by various artists, including Kong fighting the giant snake in his cave, painted in typically muscular fashion by Frank Frazetta. The above cover illustration is by Jon Foster.
