Quentin Tarantino decided that one movie wasn’t nearly enough time to spend with Hollywood’s most charming stuntman, so now Cliff Booth is getting his own novel whether you asked for it or not. The cover art for The Further Misadventures of Cliff Booth dropped this morning, and yes, he’s still wearing that leather jacket that launched a thousand mediocre Halloween costumes and at least three think-pieces about masculine aesthetics that completely missed the point.
Cliff Booth returns in prose form, which means we’re about to find out what happens when a guy who maybe killed his wife with a spear gun gets internal monologue and a narrator who definitely isn’t objective about how cool he looks doing backflips. The novel serves as a direct sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, picking up after that fateful night at Spahn Ranch where things got flamethrower-heavy and historically inaccurate in the best way possible.
Tarantino has been threatening to write this for years, apparently unsatisfied with simply letting the character live happily ever after in the 1960s with his dog and his questionable employment history that definitely involves the mob.
The cover itself is aggressively retro, featuring Cliff looking contemplative while leaning against a car that probably costs more than your entire education and smells like unfiltered cigarettes and regret. It screams “pulpy 1970s paperback you found in your uncle’s basement next to a Playboy,” which is exactly the aesthetic Tarantino would mainline if he could figure out how to turn books into intravenous drugs.
The book promises more of Cliff Booth’s questionable decision-making and probably at least three scenes where he explains why he doesn’t trust method actors while simultaneously being the most method-adjacent person in any room he enters.
This isn’t Tarantino’s first literary rodeo. He’s been on a book tour of his own cinematic universe lately, releasing novelizations that expand scenes he couldn’t fit into his films because they were too busy being three hours long and featuring feet in close-up. But giving Cliff Booth his own dedicated novel suggests Tarantino thinks the guy has more stories to tell, specifically about stunt work, manslaughter investigations, and the proper way to make macaroni and cheese while drunk at 3 AM.
It’s a curious choice for a character who works best as a stoic enigma, but then again, Tarantino never met a backstory he didn’t want to explain in excruciating detail while referencing obscure TV westerns.
The book hits shelves later this year, assuming Tarantino doesn’t decide to rewrite the ending three more times or turn it into a Broadway musical starring someone from High School Musical who can do a convincing accent and handle a spear gun. If you’ve ever wanted to know what Cliff Booth thinks about while driving through Los Angeles traffic in 1969, here’s your expensive hardcover chance.
Just don’t expect him to have learned any lessons about pool cue safety or home invasion protocols. Some heroes never change, they just get more literary and slightly more problematic.