From CrimeReads: This is not your usual novelization of a movie. It’s much stranger…

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Books adapted from movies don’t have a sterling reputation. They’re often viewed as slapdash cash-grabs by writers-for-hire, despite some notable examples to the contrary—for example, Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (written concurrently with the screenplay) and Alan Dean Foster’s “Alien.”

Now Quentin Tarantino is providing his own twist on this odd genre with the novelization of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” the 2019 movie he wrote and directed. The story follows fading Western-movie star Rick Dalton (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie) and his stuntman/assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) as they navigate Hollywood in 1969, drinking and talking and lurking around movie sets. Various stars, including Sharon Tate and Bruce Lee, drift around the edges; Charles Manson and his band of murderous hippies lurk in the darkness, readying to do something terrible.

At almost 400 pages, the book is quite long, and formatted like one of the pocket paperbacks of yesteryear. It’s also written in a very colloquial style that’ll be instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever read one of Tarantino’s screenplays; but unlike a screenplay (usually limited to somewhere between 120 and 180 pages), the novelistic format allows him to take long digressions into everything from the drinking habits of Golden Age movie stars to the thoughts drifting through Manson’s head.

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