Quentin Tarantino is set to contribute to what the film director described as the “often marginalised, yet beloved sub-genre” of movie novelisations, after being signed to write a novel based on his film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

The director has signed a two-book deal with HarperCollins, with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which follows a fading actor and his stunt double in 1969 Los Angeles as they cross paths with the Manson cult, to be published in June. It is, said the publisher, “at once hilarious, delicious and brutal”.

Tarantino said in a statement that movie novelisations were the first adult books he read back in the 1970s. “To this day I have a tremendous amount of affection for the genre,” said the director. “So as a movie-novelisation aficionado, I’m proud to announce Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as my contribution to this often marginalised, yet beloved sub-genre in literature. I’m also thrilled to further explore my characters and their world in a literary endeavour that can (hopefully) sit alongside its cinematic counterpart.”

The second book, Cinema Speculation, will be a nonfiction “deep dive into the movies of the 1970s, a rich mix of essays, reviews, personal writing and tantalizing ‘what if’s, from one of cinema’s most celebrated film-makers, and its most devoted fan.”

HarperCollins vice-president and executive editor Noah Eaker, who acquired North American rights to the books, told Deadline: “Quentin Tarantino’s literary talents have been in plain sight since his first scripts, but to see how skillfully he endows his characters with life on the page and how he constantly takes a reader by surprise, even one who knows the movie by heart, is to see a master storyteller trying on a new form and making it his own.”