Mann includes a comparison of four different beginnings of the magazine fictionizations of The Mummy, showing how much each can differ stylistically, diving into the movie from various angles. Some of the stories depart from the scripts of the original films, and in the 60s the authors were apparently required to add "sex" scenes. Also, Mann enjoys how early fictionizations captured the cultural sensitivities and assumptions of the earlier generations. He quotes extensively from the text and extra-textual material (descriptions of other popular books by the same publisher found at the back of the photoplay) to demonstrate his point.

Mann digresses (but interestingly enough) on the evolving state of filmed horror, moving from early rich estates where evil dwelled only among the eccentric, to crime syndicates of evil after World War II, to mindless omnipresent slasher evil (a date he does not state but marks the climbing dissent against the Vietnam War) begun for him by Night of the Living Dead, a film he laments as allowing evil to remain uncontained by the end. I'm not sure I agree. Not only is evil being rounded up, but also the film had something deeper to say that many slasher movies did not. A heroic end for our protagonist is denied, sadly, but that packs an emotive punch and in so doing, the film asks us if the mob acting as a knee-jerk lynchers can tell who the evil are.

Perhaps the most curious digression is Mann's pleasure over the previous book owners, whom he even tried to contact. I can't say that I don't share a similar fascination as I've been curious about the scrawling in my used book (this appeared in my copy of James E. Gunn's The Witching Hour in a looping, possibly feminine hand although many of the letters are tight suggesting masculinity: "Leon--All 3 stories Very good." with "very" underlined three times). But Mann used to be a private investigator and flaunts his clear talent to convincingly decode the details of the previous owners from seemingly irrelevant clues, discovering the owners' ages, physical disability, and reading conditions.

Mann, now a reference librarian at the Library of Congress, must be as talented an investigator of digging up photoplays themselves as I could not find a few of the titles he mentioned after various searches on Ebay, Half, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Fetchbook. To collect this kind of work must require a sleuthing beyond mere mortals such as myself.

One of the lost film fictionizations, "The Gorilla," is actually included in the appendix of this book, helping the book place this genre of "literature" into its context. Together with the preface and introduction one gets a good sense of the attractions such a collection might hold. The weight of the book -- about one hundred pages out of one hundred seventy-eight -- covers a checklist of some five hundred of such books. Therefore, Mann's book is designed for those who want to pursue such a collection; however, the author states that other books are more comprehensive, so the audience this book truly serves is those wanting to test the waters of such an endeavor, to know what the attractions are, and in that regard, the book is a smashing success.