The Kolchak Companion: 50 Years of Night Stalking is the complete history of one of the most influential characters on horror and television, reporter Carl Kolchak.

Written by Edgar-nominated Mark Dawidziak, the planet’s foremost authority on all things Kolchak, the book charts each incarnation of the character first played by Darren McGavin in The Night Stalker, which set the ratings records for a TV movie when it first aired on January 11, 1972.

A highly rated sequel movie, The Night Strangler, premiered a year later. It was followed by a 20-episode series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which began a one-season run on Friday the 13th, September 1974.

The Kolchak movies and series went on to inspire and influence everything from The X-Files, Men in Black and Twin Peaks to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Walking Dead and Supernatural.

Featuring several new chapters and interviews, The Kolchak Companion is a greatly expanded and completely revised new version of a book first published as Night Stalking in 1991, then as The Night Stalker Companion in 1997. It includes extensive interviews with McGavin, Kolchak creator Jeff Rice and Night Stalker producer Dan Curtis (Dark Shadows), as well as such other key Kolchak contributors as writers Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, The Twilight Zone), David Chase (The Sopranos) and Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future).