The First Power: 1990 Lou Diamond Phillips horror thriller gets a novelization (2025)

I was only about 7 years old when I first watched writer/director Robert Resnikoff’s 1990 supernatural horror thriller The First Power – and as you might imagine, the things that movie had to show me shook my world and creeped the hell out of me. I loved it! I have counted The First Power as one of my favorites ever since, so it’s very cool to see that it has finally been given the novelization treatment, courtesy of Christian Francis. Hard copies of The First Power novelization can be purchased at THIS LINK, and the Kindle edition is available HERE.

Here’s the description: Based on the original screenplay, this novel delivers the high-stakes action, horror, and supernatural tension that made the film unforgettable. Detective Russell Logan thought he had ended Patrick Channing’s reign of terror. The serial killer was caught, sentenced to death, and executed. But some killers don’t stay dead. Channing returns, stronger, faster, and more dangerous than ever. No longer bound by human limitations, he possesses supernatural abilities that make him nearly unstoppable. With nowhere to run, Logan must hunt a killer who doesn’t play by the rules of the living. As the body count rises, Logan’s only hope lies in Tess Seaton, a psychic with disturbing visions of the evil lurking in the shadows. Together, they must unravel Channing’s dark past before he claims his next victim. But how do you stop a killer who has already died?

Resnikoff’s film starred Lou Diamond Phillips, Tracy Griffith, Jeff Kober, Mykelti Williamson, Elizabeth Arlen, Dennis Lipscomb, Carmen Argenziano, Clayton Landey, Sue Giosa, and Nada Despotovich, and Juliana McCarthy, with appearances by David Gale and Bill Moseley.

I have already had the chance to read The First Power novelization and found it to be a very interesting take on the story. Most of the familiar moments from the film are there, but Francis’s version of Detective Logan is older and more broken down than the one Phillips brought to life, and the author worked with Resnikoff to come up with a slightly different ending for the book, as the filmmaker was never fully satisfied with the end of the movie. Phillips wrote a foreword for the novelization, and Resnikoff wrote an introduction for it.

Francis has also written novelizations of the Maniac Cop trilogy and Session 9, among others, and has novelizations of In the Mouth of Madness and Tremors coming our way in the near future.

Are you a fan of The First Power, and will you be reading the novelization? Let us know by leaving a comment below.