No, I’m not talking about Elvis Presley, I’m talking about the real king—the monster-ape king…the Eighth Wonder of the World: King Kong!
Coming in March is King Kong, an e-book-exclusive reprint of the 1932 novelization of the original motion picture. It’s the latest addition to our Illustrated Classics line of books, joining J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire romance Carmilla, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s space-fantasy adventure A Princess of Mars, and the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale Snow White.
Written by Delos W. Lovelace, based on the story by Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper and the screenplay by James A. Creelman and Ruth Rose, the SWC edition of King Kong features brand-new illustrations by pulp-comics artist Paul Tuma (Tales of the Green Hornet, The Twilight Avenger, Dan Turner: Hollywood Detective). The novelization also expands on the world inhabited by this famous monster of filmland and includes scenes that didn’t appear in the movie’s final cut, the most notorious of those being the terrifying “spider pit” sequence, in which a group of sailors in pursuit of Kong falls into a chasm infested with giant, man-eating arachnids. (Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake included this scene, with outright nightmare-inducing results.)
Not familiar with the beauty-and-the-beast story of Kong and his “love interest,” Ann Darrow (who was played in the 1933 original by the queen of the scream queens, Fay Wray)? Well, here’s our edition’s back-cover copy to bring you up-to-date:
Ann Darrow was a down-on-her-luck actress struggling to survive in Depression-era New York when she met moviemaker Carl Denham. He offered her the starring role in his latest film: a documentary about a long-lost island—and the godlike ape named Kong rumored to live there. Denham needed a beauty as a counterpart to the beast he hoped to find, and Ann was the answer to his prayers.
Mystery, romance, a chance to turn her life around, even the possibility of stardom—to Ann, it sounded like the adventure of a lifetime! But what she didn’t count on were the horrific dangers that awaited her on Skull Island—including the affections of a love-struck monster . . .
We’ll be doing quite a bit of promotion around here for the king’s arrival, with looks at Kong-related movies (including the original, naturally), comics, toys, and more in order to draw attention to the e-book. To paraphrase the old axiom “I teach by repetition,” here at SWC we sell books by repetition—and we’ll be repeating Kong’s name so often it’ll be hard for you to forget it!
More details to follow as we get closer to the book’s March 7 release—which, by the way, is just three days before Kong: Skull Island, the latest take on the giant ape, hits movie theaters. Why, you’d almost think we’d planned that intentionally…
