The Night Strangler (The Kolchak Papers #2) (1974)

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HALLOWEEN REVIEWS 2026

by Jeff Rice, adapted from a teleplay by Richard Matheson



Carl Kolchak is back on the job, reporting on a series of strangling murders of young women, from whom small amounts of blood are removed. 



Conceived as a sequel to the film The Night Stalker, which was the highest rated TV movie of its time, it was adapted by Jeff Rice from an original teleplay by Richard Matheson. 



A lot of the book’s appeal comes from Kolchak’s hard-boiled first-person voice. 



The ’70s journalism texture helps too—the pre-internet routine of phone calls, shoe-leather, and city politics. 



It preserves the energy of the screen version; the voices of Darren McGavin and Simon Oakland rang out in my mind while reading the dialogue of Kolchak and editor Tony Vincenzo, especially during their frequent arguments.



 Not everything holds up: the love story plays like an older-man fantasy. I like having Vincenzo back, but the re-introduction of several other familiar faces strains credibility, since it’s hard to buy that so many people would relocate from Las Vegas to Seattle around the same time. Much is made of the fact that the killer removes a small amount of blood from each of his victims, but even today we don’t have the ability to accurately measure the amount of blood in a dead body, so it’s difficult to see how 70s forensic medicine could have uncovered this fact. Nevertheless, this remains a fun read with a creepy setting in the Seattle underground, and an exciting ending.

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