The Crow: City of Angels was the sequel to the original blockbuster starring Brandon Lee. This time around, Vincent Perez was the murder victim who returns from the dead to “make the wrong things right,” which basically consists of killing everyone who had anything to do with his death and, in this go-round, the death of his child as well. I was contracted to write a novelization of David S. Goyer’s screenplay, which was a powerful and moving piece of work. Unfortunately the film itself left most of the good stuff on the cutting room floor, if it was ever filmed at all.

I had only three weeks in which to write the novel, but for some reason I was possessed by the material and the themes of love and loss which are so much a part of my own original work, so much so that I finished the book in a white-hot two weeks, embellishing and expanding on Goyer’s fine work, filling out the backstory of the various characters, and just having a helluva lot of fun.

I used epigrams for all 24 chapters, including many quotations from James Thomson’s epic poem, “The City of Dreadful Night,” and many more from classical literature about crows. In the short time I had I put an enormous amount of energy and thought into the novel, and was hugely disappointed when I saw the film the night it opened across the country. The novel, though out of print, is available on the Collector’s Series DVD.