Peter David - Novels

Novels

David's career as a novelist developed concurrently with his comic book writing career. David had been working at a publisher that went out of business, and a former coworker from that publisher became his agent, through whom he sold his first novel, Knight Life, to Ace Books. Although the sale was made before he wrote any comic books, the novel was not published until eighteen months later, in 1987. The novel depicts about the reappearance of King Arthur in modern-day New York City. Another early novel of his, Howling Mad, is about a wolf that turns into a human being after being bitten by a werewolf. Ace Books also hired David to write the Photon and Psi-Man novels, though they published them under the "house name" David Peters, over David's objections. David updated Knight Life years later when Penguin Putnam brought it back into print in 2003, and made it a trilogy with the sequels One Knight Only and Fall of Knight, which were published in 2004 and 2007, respectively. Penguin would also rerelease Howling Mad and the Psi-Man books under David's actual name.

David first began writing Star Trek novels at the request of Pocket Books editor Dave Stern, who was a fan of David's Star Trek comic book work. His Star Trek novels are among those for which he is best known, including Q-in-Law; I, Q; Vendetta; Q-Squared; and Imzadi, one of the best-selling Star Trek novels of all time. He created the ongoing novel series, Star Trek: New Frontier, a spin-off from Star Trek: The Next Generation, with John J. Ordover in 1997. New Frontier continued until April 2011, with the publication of Blind Man's Bluff, the final New Frontier novel on David's contract at the time, after which the series' future was unclear to David. David's other science fiction tie-in novels include written five Babylon 5 novels, three of which were originals, and two of which were adaptations of the TV movies Thirdspace and In the Beginning.

His other novel adaptations include those of the movies The Return of Swamp Thing, The Rocketeer, Batman Forever, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, Hulk, The Incredible Hulk, Fantastic Four, and Iron Man. He also wrote an original Hulk novel, The Incredible Hulk: What Savage Beast, based on story ideas that he was not permitted to use in the comic book, and an adaptation of an unused Alien Nation television script, "Body and Soul".

David's 2009 novel Tigerheart is a re-imagining of Peter Pan with a mix of new and old characters, told as a Victorian bedtime story, much like the classic tale. It was praised by Ain't It Cool News, and honored by the School Library Journal as one of 2008's Best Adult Books for High School Students. His Sir Apropos of Nothing fantasy trilogy, Sir Apropos of Nothing, The Woad to Wuin and Tong Lashing, features characters and settings completely of David’s own creation, as does his 2007 fantasy novel, Darkness of the Light, which is the first in a new trilogy of novels titled The Hidden Earth. The second installment, The Highness of the Low, was scheduled to be published in September 2009, but David has related on his blog that it has been delayed until the winter of 2012.

David's 2010 novel work includes Year of the Black Rainbow, a novel cowritten with musician Claudio Sanchez of the band Coheed and Cambria, that was released with the band's album of the same name, and an Fable original novel The Balverine Order, set between the events of Fable II and Fable III. In April 2011, David announced that, in addition to another Fable novel, he and a number of other writers, including Glenn Hauman, Mike Friedman and Bob Greenberger, were assembling an electronic publishing endeavor called Crazy Eight Press, which would allow them to publish e-books directly to fans, the first of which would be David's Arthurian story, The Camelot Papers. David explained that the second book in his "Hidden Earth" trilogy would also be published through Crazy Eight.