Forgotten Realms Pool of Radiance by Jane Cooper Hong and Jim Ward 1989, TSR
A novelization of the 1988 video game, and the most D&D feeling D&D novel I've read yet. Our party meets in a tavern (a spellcaster/warrior, cleric of Tyr, and ranger/thief) and are blackmailed into a series of missions by a crooked councilman to clear out the uncivilized parts of the city.
Our party faces orcs, the undead, and a possessed dragon. In a highlight for me, they clear out a gnoll temple, a human temple defiled like Leatherface redecorated. This is probably the goriest and most violent D&D novel I've read - severed body parts, spurting blood, fat sizzling from lightning spells - which was especially incongruent as the audiobook was read like a children's story.
A 17th century warlock is propelled through time and space, followed by a witch-hunter, both landing in late 80s LA. The warlock seeks to put together three hidden pieces of a grimoire which reveals the true name of God, in order that he may read it backwards and undo creation. The witch-hunter teams up with a young woman on a road trip to stop him.
Goes way harder than the movie. The warlock is endowed with "Satan's member" which is his main murder weapon. Haven't seen the movie in a while, but I don't remember the yawning anuses and sagging vaginas of his victims. And I doubt there's a deleted scene of Julian Sands sucking eyeballs out of Mary Woronov's nipples.
Weakest with the banter in the dialogue, which I'm guessing comes straight from the script. Came out two years before the movie was released in America.
The Rockford Files The Green Bottle by Stuart M. Kaminsky 1996, Forge
Rockford is hired to find a missing aspiring actress, gets involved in the world of painted Chinese bottles and Hollywood wannabees, and is framed for murder. An engaging enough mystery with a little action, but like the series it coasts on charm, especially with Rockford's friend Angel trying to start a cat grooming business.
The book is nestled among the TV movies of the 90s, and a lot of it deals with Rockford grieving his dead father Rocky. We also get a little insight into his prison years.
The Incredible Hulk: What Savage Beast by Peter David 1995, Putnam
This novel takes place in a time period where the psyches of Hulk and Banner have swapped - the Hulk retains his intelligence while big and green, but when he gets angry enough he turns into a raging 120 pound nerd.
He's hounded by a new Hulkbuster squad as he and Betty try to live a normal life, Banner teleworking in IT and Betty working at a daycare. Betty becomes pregnant and gives birth to conjoined twins, one seemingly normal, the other a grey hulk. Doctor Strange assists with the separation, upon which the Maestro (a future evil Hulk) dimension warps in and snatches up the child.
With the assistance of Strange, Hulk goes to the future to face Maestro, who is building an army of alternative universe Hulks with the help of their now grown son.
I've enjoyed David's comics more than his prose. For me there were some pacing issues - a lot of domestic business and pregnancy drama, not much on the Hulk smashing stuff. It also felt very recycled, as if this was based on unused drafts of other scripts. We get Glenn Talbot's nephew as the obsessed military leader of the Hulkbusters acting much like his dead Uncle. The complicated pregnancy angle was done better with the birth of Franklin Richards (and a year later with the Parkers), and this version of the Maestro didn't differ much from the one "killed" a couple years before.
A couple is going through a rough divorce, with the wife getting controversial therapy for the childhood abuse she received from her mother. Their kid has signs of abuse and hubby tries to get custody, and to get his ex away from her therapist. Meanwhile, his mother in law is killed by a child-like humanoid.
Somehow, the therapy is causing the wife to spawn physical manifestations of her rage, which go on a killing spree. Hubby tries to reconcile, saying they need to be a family again, and failing that he strangles her, the end.
Novelizations of horror films often suffer from pacing problems, with background and exposition taking up more page space than the horror elements, and this is no exception. Has no resemblance to a horror story for well over the first half, and makes no attempt to describe Cronenberg's visuals.
I haven't seen the movie, but if it's like the book, Cronenberg abandons all pretense at subtext and just openly fantasizes about murdering his ex. The story is based on his own divorce and child custody case, to the point of casting lookalikes. This may beat out Taken for the most divorced film ever made.
Overpriced at Amazon https://amzn.to/47jZoes , listen to the Audiobooks of the Damned version
A Nightmare on Elm Street: Protege by Tim Waggoner 2005, Black Flame
Years ago, Freddy kills a pregnant woman and implants part of himself in the unborn child, who survives. The child is protected from Freddy's influence by a dream catcher until he accidently breaks it, causing his dark side to take over.
Good characters and matches the feel of the original films better than most Black Flame books, but suffers from the same page bloat as the others and could have been cut in half.
The novelization of the film, which I'm mostly familiar through MST3K. A downed electrical line causes worms to attack humans. Eventually. Mostly it's a city nerd trying to hook up with a country gal and them finding and losing skeletons.
I'm guessing this was based on the earlier script, though very close to the movie. A flashback to how Roger lost his thumb is the only full new scene. All the characters are described as amazingly attractive, skinny Mick is described as 175 pounds, and the Sheriff is a smooth talking ladies man.
Gorier and with more ambitious effects than the film - Roger's final form is as an ambulatory pile of worms. Biggest loss was that the best line - "You gonna be the worm face" is written as "Now we’ll see what you look like after the worms get you!"
Stepping away from Forgotten Realms to another Dungeons & Dragons setting, Dark Sun. Dark Sun is a set on a dying planet, ravaged by magic gone wrong, where metal and water are scarce but psionics are common. Darker than other settings, with some twists - elves are a despised underclass and halflings are feral savages.
Half-elf Aric, a blacksmith with the ability to communicate with metal, is recruited by the Shadow King to join an expedition to retrieve metal from a long-buried city uncovered in a sandstorm. The activity unleashes an ancient evil and Aric must rush back to warn the city.
Most of the story concerns the fights and struggles to get across the desert, while the main plot, and subplot of a serial killer attacking elfin women, felt a bit rushed. These books often assume a working knowledge of the source material, and I had to look up a few monsters to know what they were supposed to look like.
Final Destination: Dead Reckoning by Natasha Rhodes 2005, Black Flame
A rock singer in LA has a premonition of a collapsing basement rock venue. After her and a handful of others escape the tragedy, they begin to die off one by one in gory spectacles from convoluted, Rube Goldberg like accidents...is what would have happened in a proper Final Destination novel.
Instead we get 406 pages of the author doing her darndest to not deliver on the formula. I only made it two thirds of the way, in which we get three deaths. First dies of an explosion off page. The second has a brief Rube Goldberg set up, only to get a swerve and someone else dies from mundane failing brakes. Unpredictable enough, except the third death does exactly the same thing.
The death traps work in the movies by building suspense from each step being laid out, the inevitability of the execution, and the gory aftermath. Here we get none of that. The setups are constantly interrupted by cutting away to small talk, to the point I forgot someone was supposed to die. For the third death, a full 17% of the book went by between the set up and the execution, almost all of which was teenage idiots repeating things back and forth to each other.
I appreciate the challenge the franchise has with how to fill time between death scenes, which would be even worse in print, but this has some of the worse padding I've ever seen outside of a Fanthrorpe novel, down to the narration adding "really, really" to adjectives several times.
Currently not available anywhere on the internet, and you couldn't afford it if it was. Try the fan audiobook from The 80s Slasher Librarian.
There's a wizard Elminster who can't use magic except for his magic wands accompanied by ranger Sharantyr, joined later by two Harpers, all of whom murder several hundred soldiers and wizards in the High Dale. I think we're supposed to already know who these people are and what they're up to. Read reviews that decried the basically 300 pages of murder hoboing in the middle, but this is honestly the minimum acceptable level of action.
War of the Spider Queen Book 1 Dissolution by Richard Lee Byers 2002 Wizards of the Coast
Set in the Dungeons and Dragons setting of the Underdark, a series of connecting underground caverns in cities, the Drow, or dark elves, are plotting against each other. Some males have escaped the matriarchal society, and it appears that their deity Lolth has withdrawn her favor, limiting their spellcasting ability.
The story culminates in an uprising by the lesser creatures of the Underdark - goblins, kobolds, that kind of stuff, led by an undead mind flayer lich. There are tons of spells and magic items and hand crossbows and this is probably the closest a D&D novel will come to my kind of thing.
I should have read this instead of listening to the audiobook, as I have a harder time keeping track of characters in spoken word. It didn't help me that every character was a drow magic user - someone has to be named Bardo the Bard for me to maybe keep track of who they are in these kinds of things.
Alien Nation 5 Slag Like Me by Barry B. Longyear 1994 Pocket Books
In 1959, journalist John Howard Griffin disguised himself as a Black man using tanning booths, medication, and make up, and travelled the American South, recording the experience for Sepia magazine. Unlike the similarly themed Soul Man...
his book Black Like Me seems to still be well regarded. I was familiar with the parodies, from Eddie Murphy in Saturday Night Live...
In Slag Like Me, a human reporter undergoes surgical treatment to look Tenctonese. He goes undercover in LA, hangs around gangsters, and exposes bigoted police. When he goes missing, LAPD and the FBI investigate, and Matthew Sikes undergoes the same procedure to flush out whoever did whatever to the reporter.
Meanwhile, George Francisco is partnered with former overseer and current FBI agent Paul Iniko to chase down leads, such as the exposed crooked cops and an angry neighbor.
I don't know if this story was based on unused season two scripts, and tie-in novels come with a lot of restrictions, so I don't want to assign blame, but everything about Slag Like Me gets it wrong.
Alien Nation is a metaphor for immigration, assimilation, and bigotry. These themes are baked into every scene of every story. I struggle to comprehend the creative mind that, after a movie, 22 television episodes, and four novels, decides "Hey, how about we make this next book about racism?" It also falls into the same trap as some X-Man stories - instead of using fictional bigotry to highlight and explore actual bigotry, it uses actual racism as a metaphor to explore the real theme, fictional racism against aliens who do not exist. And the discussions on racism and bigotry are not subtextual here, it's pure soapboxing.
One would think, given the title and cover and all, the main story would be Sikes living life as a newcomer. You would be wrong. A decent amount of page space is budgeted to him preparing, but he's barely out in public in disguise and can't manage to stay in character for more than two minutes. His first undercover act is to make an appointment with a Tenctonese gang leader, to whom he instantly announces that he is a human cop.
Very quickly they're pulled over and beaten up by the police. Matt is taken to the hospital and has amnesia, so I was hoping we'd have a bit where he would think he was Tenctonese for a while, but nope, he gets his memory back almost right away and promptly tells everyone he is a human cop. Sikes is not very good at going undercover.
At no time did the foundational premise of the book, Sikes going undercover as a Newcomer, have any affect on the plot or themes, other than to discover that LA cops would be as mean to Newcomers as they are to everyone else, which Sikes already knows.
The mystery plot is equally disappointing. Various conspiracies are hinted out before it's revealed to be characters who are named in passing once, and they did it for dumb reasons. Some mysteries have non-sequitur endings that reflect the chaotic nature of real crime, other times it reads like the author didn't feel like wrapping everything up and just picked a killer at random. This felt like the latter.
As with the last book, Sikes and Francisco are split up through most of the story, denying the buddy cop element, and is replace by Francisco and Iniko. We get kind of a Bugs/Daffy, Mickey/Donald deal where Francisco goes from being the rational half of the duo to being the irrational one. Pretty much all the soap opera elements, such as Francisco's home life, are neglected. We do get a little bit more of Dobbs, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs' character, which was nice.
Alien Nation 4 The Change by Barry B. Longyear 1994 Pocket Books
One of George's former resistance comrade in arms escapes from prison and uses mind control devices to fulfill an oath to kill anyone who has ever known George. George is going through alien menopause and Matt spends most of the the time in the hospital. Buck is skipping class to hang out with Tenctonese elders, who all sound like hippie burn outs.
Nasty enough villain, but the ending felt unfocused. Did not have the feel of the TV show in plotting or tone, and I assume that the cursing, violence, and rape scene wouldn't find it's way on the small screen. Based on a script for the unproduced season two, but not made into a TV movie like others.
Captain America: Dark Designs by Stefan Petrucha 2016 Marvel
Cap and Iron Man fight a Sleeper, a robot left over by the Nazis after WWII. This sleeper is just a series of geometric shapes, one of which is somehow powered by an Infinity Gem shard. Meanwhile, Cap is found to have a dormant virus that he caught while frozen in ice, as does the Red Skull who at this time lives in a copy of Rogers' body.
Other than a quick fight with the Red Skull, it's mostly SHIELD flying Cap around avoiding and fighting floating shapes. There's a subplot of a CDC scientist who wants to eradicate the threat of the virus while Cap heroically threatens the human race since there are no other superheroes on Earth.
For some reason the story is set in 2005, but other than a couple scenes with PDAs instead of phones it could have been at any time. It might have been set in the past since Sam Wilson was Captain America at the time, but usually Marvel avoids time references and says things like "set before the events of..." Had a mid-90s feel to me.
Hawkeye is ambidextrous and Rogers only has one scar, which he got trying to save Bucky. And we find out that Captain America solving the trolley problem is as insufferable as you think it would be - "I would simply save everybody", "You can't", "I'd try harder", etc.
Alien Nation 3 Body and Soul by Peter David 1993 Pocket Books
Detective Sikes relationship with newcomer Cathy awkwardly moves forward. One has to be trained to arouse Tenctonese women lest their superhuman strength injure or kill them, so they enter a sex class, which Sikes approaches with his typical maturity.
Meanwhile George offers to father Albert's child and Susan, being influenced by her human coworkers, becomes jealous. Emily hits the Tenctonese version of puberty and tries to hang out with older kids, and Buck manages to stay out of trouble.
The differences in anatomy and culture fosters a theme of communication and consent in a mature manner while still being fodder for juvenile humor. And there's the actual plot - a giant and child escape from a genetics lab, but that doesn't take up much page length.
For some reason the prose grated on me for the first few pages until I could get into it.
Predator: Stalking Shadows by James A. Moore and Mark Morris 2020 Titan Books
This tie-in novel fills in the gap between the 1990 film Predator 2, which was set in 1997 for some reason, and the 2020 video game Predator: Hunting Grounds, and maybe ties in specifically with a DLC set in 2025. Based on this novel, not much happened over 28 years.
This is the story of marine Scott Devlin, who went from a private guarding the ruins in the aftermath of Predator 2 to running an OWLF command center, the OWLF being the secret Predator hunting organization that Gary Busey worked for.
Ninety percent of the page count is military peeing contests. "You don't have clearance for this soldier", "I don't report to you", "Who's your commanding officer?", etc. Most of the rest is Devlin trying to make sense of the skinned corpses showing up in terrorist conflicts around the globe. A little of this would be OK to show Devlin's perspective, but seeing as how the reader already knows it was done by Predators, way to much page count is devoted to a non-mystery.
Over the decades, Devlin joins Dutch Schafer, Schwarzenegger's character from the first film, and runs counter-terrorism missions that run across the Predators' handiwork, but not so much actual Predators. There's a quick sequence at the beginning with Dutch fighting a Yautja, and a quick fight at the end, with some non-encounters along the way. The best action sequence was a bar fight.
Afterwards there's a lengthy epilogue with Devlin finding love and describing the aftermath of some of the comic tie-ins. At 330 pages it could have easily have lost a third, and the audiobook felt like an eternity, probably because I couldn't skim through the lengthy "What could have done this?" inner monologues. A lot of it felt like a Grammarly commercial in reverse, with the sentences packed with as many redundant words that could fit.
I try to be kind to tie-ins, as they sometimes have impossible stipulations from the franchise owners. I could see this being a case of "Don't add any new characters, organizations, or concepts, and only have them defeat three Predators. 150,000 words. And make sure to introduce female Predators, dog predator things, and why Dutch is able to move without a walker in 2025."
Alien Nation 2 Dark Horizon by K.W. Jeter 1993 Pocket
The Alien Nation TV series ended in 1990. In 1993, the book series started, some based on unproduced scripts - my guess is they had some of season two already written. Then in 1994 these scripts were used for a series of TV movies, which lasted until 1997.
The book has two stories somewhat intertwined, both of which seem to be bog standard Alien Nation plotlines - a group of bigoted humans seeks to exterminate the newcomers, and the newcomers' slave masters threaten to come to Earth to recapture their property.
Lots of emotional subplots - Sykes and Cathy relationship, Sykes gets jealous of George's promotion, Albert gets married. Buck gets into Catcher in the Rye and stalks a teacher, which is very in character for him.
The plotting of Dark Horizon works for two episodes of a TV series, but is awkward for a novel. It would have worked better as two distinct halves, but it's presented as a single story, so you get a climax 3/4ths of the way in, then a whole new story.
It was true to the series, but there'd be a learning curve for new readers. Jeter does my least favorite thing I see in straight novelizations - to fill out page count, we get several pages of internal monologue of minor characters, and usually not in a way that adds to the story or fleshes out the characters.
The Crow: Temple of Night by S.P. Somtow 1999 Harper
Thai-American journalist Stephen Lelliott works on a story about the Thai sex industry, focusing on a young prostitute Dao and her two brothers. Dao is killed by budding serial killer, Embassy nebbish Dirk Temple, followed soon afterwards by Stephen, who rises with the power of the Crow to flip around and get vengeance.
The first half is very slow and hampered by a glaring plot point. Dao's virginity is up for auction, and Stephen gets some cash from his producers to win the auction, with the view of following her from Thailand to her new life in America. But he's not buying out her contract, a fact which everyone seems to be aware. If the plan was to sneak her away from her pimp, he didn't need to pay for her virginity. As it is, he pays the money for nothing while they both act as if the act would free her. Things like this wouldn't bother me when we're dealing with crows bringing people back to life, but this was the only thing going on for the first half of the novel.
Also distracting was Stephen's death, dished out by a child gang shooting him with super soakers loaded with acid so strong it melted him down to the bone and burned a hole through the floor. Things finally start becoming horrific, in the 90s serial killer style of little actual violence, just the aftermath of it in the way of gruesomely displayed bodies. Eyeballs scooped out with spoons, children shoved back in the womb, crucifixions, intestines lining the walls like plumbing, the works.
Stephen comes back as a Crow and takes vengeance on Dirk while protecting his grandmother and Dao's surviving brother from limo chamfered AK-47 wielding goons. This leads to underground sex shows of the social and political elite, who are ripped to shreds by giant murders of crows. Goes so over the top it ends with kaiju size manifestations of cosmic figures fighting over the city.
I'm finally getting into the headspace for the Crow once I figured out how to balance the self-seriousness and the silliness. This one had too little Crow and too much milling around, but it pulled it off by the end. I was expecting Somtow to be more poetic and/or pretentious, but this came out like fairly standard 90s fair.
Predator: Concrete Jungle by Nathan Archer Bantam 1995
Predators attack drug dealers and cops in New York City. Believing these attacks are related to the disappearance of his brother Dutch, NYPD cop John Schaefer travels to Central America for clues. He kills a Predator, is captured by a drug cartel which is attacked by Predators, and returns to New York with General Philips, who leads a secret government anti-Predator squad. Philips plans to turn Schaefer over to the Predators to avoid massive attacks on an urban population.
Schaefer escapes, and with his partner Rasche recruit and arm psychotic street gangs to fight the Predators. There's the beginnings of a massive showdown in the city streets, with cops, gangs, and the Army facing down multiple Predator ships, but the fighting just kind of stops, the Predators collect their dead, and leave.
Based on the 1989 comic with a couple of added scenes. Many of the story elements appeared later in the superior film Predator 2. Not as exciting as it should have been, the plot is iffy, and the voice is what one would expect for a comic book novelization in the 90s. In addition to constant tough guy bravado, we get constant italics to denote sarcasm. I'm so sure that's a good literary technique.
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