When I was growing up in the seventies and eighties, nearly every popular movie had its novelization. Videos and DVDs gradually made the genre less popular--though movie novelizations still exist, mainly for those who want to see the characters and the worlds of their favourite films fleshed out.
This novelization of a classic sci-fi movie is a fairly early example of its kind (but not the earliest, as the first movie novelization appeared in 1912!) Unusually, it's a hardback. By the standards of 1954, Creature From the Black Lagoon was a glossy and expensive science fiction movie, and apparently the people commissioning this book wanted to keep things (comparatively) classy. Interestingly enough, this movie was novelized a second time in 1977--this time in paperback as a part of a series of tie-ins to classic Universal horror films.
"Vargo Stratten" was a pseudonym of John Russell Fearn, a pulp writer whose career dated back to the early 1930s.
