Resident Evil Novelizations

When I was 11 years old, I went to my best friend’s house to play the first Resident Evil game on his playstation. I remember being blown away by the cut scene for the first zombie. The violence in this game was like nothing we had seen before. Unfortunately, the game was actually quite hard, so I never got past the first few zombies. It was only about a year and a half ago that I bought a pair of USB game controllers and went back and played the game through. It’s pretty clunky, but still enjoyable. Last spring, I went through all of the main games in the series up to and including Resident Evil 4. I really enjoyed the games, and I thought about doing a post on them here, but I don’t really want to get too much into video games. I was pretty happy to find out that novelizations had been written for the first 5 games of the series.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy – 1998

So the S.T.A.R.S. Alpha team, a group of soldiers disappear in the woods. A second team, the Bravos, including Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine, are sent in to rescue the Alphas, but they find a mansion full of zombies and monsters. Chris manages to find one of the Alpha team, a girl named Rebecca Chambers. They figure out that a local pharmaceutical company has been performing atrocities in the name of science. The Bravos’ team leader, a lad named Wesker, is a slippery individual who seems to know more than he should. Things go horribly wrong, and a lot of blood is spilled.

Resident Evil: Caliban Cove – 1998

After escaping from the mansion, the remaining S.T.A.R.S. return to the city to find that Umbrella has convinced the public that the S.T.A.R.S. are dangerous criminals who caused a massacre. The S.T.A.R.S. vow to take revenge and head to one of Umbrella’s secret facilities in Caliban Cove. Unfortunately for everyone, this facility is run by a mad scientist with a plan to turn the entire human race into zombies. Rebecca Chambers is the main character here even though she only played a minor role in the first book. Caliban Cove is an original story. It was ok.

Resident Evil: City of the Dead – 1999

Resident Evil 2 is my favourite game in the series. The music in the main hall of the police station is my favourite. In this one Leon Kennedy, a rookie cop, shows up for his first day of work at Raccoon City Police Station. On his way he is attacked by zombies and meets Claire Redfield. Claire is the sister of Chris Redfield from the first book/game. Nearly everyone in the city has turned into a zombie, and Claire and Leon need to find a way out.

Resident Evil: Underworld – 1999

This is another original story. Leon Kennedy, Claire Redfield, Rebecca Chambers and some of the non-game S.T.A.R.S. from the Caliban Cove book break into another secret Umbrella facility. This facility has another mad scientist and a bunch of new monsters living in weird habitats. There’s also a dinosaur. The S.T.A.R.S. have to defeat each of the monsters. This one kind of felt like reading about a minigame that doesn’t actually exist.

Resident Evil: Nemesis – 2000

This is actually set a few days before the events in City of the Dead. Jill Valentine is back in Raccoon City. The streets are filled with zombies, and there is a giant monster stalking her to try to kill her. Resident Evil 3 was a bit of a disappointing game for me. The game play style was too similar to the previous 2 games, and while I did enjoy it, it didn’t feel as groundbreaking as other games in the series. The novel version was also a bit underwhelming.

Resident Evil: CODE Veronica – 2001

Claire Redfield still hasn’t managed to find her brother Chris, but has been kidnapped and imprisoned on a secret island. She breaks out, but this island is owned by Umbrella, so there is obviously an outbreak of their zombie virus, and everyone gets all messed up. There’s also a creepy mansion, and the “couple” who own the mansion are actually a creepy brother and sister. Chris shows up at the end, but so does Wesker. I really quite enjoyed the game of this one, but the novel was forgettable.

Resident Evil: Zero Hour – 2004

This is actually a prequel to the entire series. It tells how Rebecca Chambers ended up at the mansion in the first book/game. She was chasing down a handsome convict that turned out to be good, and the pair of them had to fight off a gross slug man.

The novels follow the games pretty closely, and while I was moderately entertained and comforted listening to the audiobook versions while doing household chores, I can’t imagine these having any appeal for people who didn’t enjoy the games. They don’t really add much to the story. There’s a mysterious character named Trent that shows up a couple of times, but despite the author’s best efforts, he never has much of an impact. Honestly, if you liked the games, these books are mindless fun, but otherwise steer clear.

There’s a new Resident Evil movie coming out next week. I went back and watched the 2002 movie a few months ago, and while I was decently amused, I didn’t bother with the sequels. The trailer for the new movie looks pretty good to me. I know there is some controversy over the fact that it isn’t a straight adaptation of the games, but I really don’t think that would work. I really liked the director’s other horror movies, so I am hoping to go see this new one in the cinema.

Things have been a bit choppy over the summer, but life has settled down again, so weekly posts have resumed. Next week’s post will be about some freaks.

Some Books by Brian Evenson

I’ve been thinking about doing a post on Brian Evenson for quite a while. I read Last Days about 3 years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s more of a thriller than a horror novel, but it’s about a cult who like to amputate their own body parts. Cool! It’s quite messed up. Although I’ve definitely forgotten most of the plot, I have not forgotten how much I enjoyed reading it.

The next thing I read by Evenson was Altmann’s Tongue, his first collection of short stories. I read this shortly after finishing Last Rites. Part of its appeal was that I had heard the contents were so extreme that it led to the author having to leave his job at a Mormon university. In truth, I remember almost nothing about this collection. I can’t say I was overly impressed, and I didn’t read anything else by Evenson for a while.

In December I read Father of Lies. I had seen this one described as a more straight forward horror novel than Evenson’s other books. It is truly fucked. It’s about a paedophile priest who is either insane or possessed by the Devil. I read it in an evening, and it almost pains me to admit that I really enjoyed it. It’s a horrid book, real feel-bad fiction. It was so unpleasant that I picked up and read another book by Evenson a few days after finishing it.

The Warren is more of a science fiction novel than the ones mentioned above, but it’s gloomy existential science fiction rather than Star Wars or the likes. This was another book that took me less than a day to read and has encouraged me to venture outside the realms of straight horror recently. It’s definitely worth a read if you’re interested in contemplating the limitations of identity and what it means to be a person.

So Brian Evenson has also written novels for movie and video game franchises under the pen name B.K. Evenson. I presume this is about separating his “literary” work from the more commercial stuff that he writes. I have no real interest in this books about video games, but after searching my local library’s database for audiobooks by Evenson, I found Feral.

Feral is a collaboration Evenson did with James DeMonaco, the author and director of The Purge movies. I haven’t seen any of those films, but I have a general idea of what they’re about. When you think about it, a story of violent survivalist action/adventure put through the filter of a literary author with a penchant for nastiness could turn out very well. I am happy to say that Feral pulls it off quite successfully.

A pandemic hits the world and turns all men into fast zombies that really hate women. After 3 years, only a few small armoured settlements of women are left. Allie is a scout in one of these settlements, and she spends her days looting abandoned stores for food and goods while dodging, incapacitating and sometimes kidnapping the feral male zombies. She rides around on a motorbike and carries guns and machetes and is basically a total badass. Things get worrying when she notices that there are far more males skulking around her territory than usual. To complicate matters further, one of these males doesn’t seem to be infected.

This is not the kind of horror I usually enjoy. The most similar thing I’ve read was probably Brian Keene’s The Complex, a novel that I wanted to like but struggled to enjoy. Feral was better though. I don’t know the story behind it, but given DeMonaco’s work in film, I assume this was originally an idea for a movie. I think it would work well as a movie, but I understand that the zombie film market was probably oversaturated in the years prior to 2017 when it came out. Also, I can see how the pandemic element to the book may have discouraged studios from considering the idea in the few years after it was released.

Feral is definitely more typical of the horror genre than Evenson’s other works, but it was fast paced and entertaining. I quite liked it. I don’t know if I’ll discuss them here, but I am quite certain I will read more of Evenson’s books in the future.

Are Zombies Real? Wade Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow

I saw the cover for the VHS of The Serpent and the Rainbow at the video shop after mass when I was a kid. I’ve mentioned before how I would become hung up on the covers of these 18+ rated forbidden films that it seemed I would never see. It stayed with me, and as soon as I could, downloaded and watched the movie. The only thing I remember about the film is that I thought it was shit, so it’s not surprising that I never bothered tracking down the book.

I don’t know why, but it popped into my head the other day, and it took me just a few minutes to locate a copy of the book. I knew that the author was an academic, and the book was somehow related to zombies and voodoo, but I didn’t really know what to expect.

The book starts off like an adventure novel, the author describing some his experiences in the jungle of south America as a student. This stuff is quite impressive and made me jealous. I never got to travel through the jungle for credits during my time in university.
The main adventure begins when he approached by some weirdo academics who tell him about Haitian voodoo and their desire to acquire the elusive poison that is used to turn people into zombies. There had long been claims that people in Haiti were dying and being buried, only to return to their families years later with little to no memory of the intervening time period. The locals attributed this to voodoo, but the academics believed it was being done with a potent chemical.

Davis goes to Haiti to track this stuff down, and he meets a bunch of colourful characters. He helps one of these weirdoes dig up the corpse of a child and then they mix parts of that decaying infant into a potion with bits and pieces of some minging animals.

After a bit of research, Davis realises that it’s the inclusion of a pufferfish in this mixture that’s responsible for the apparent reanimation of corpses. The poison in pufferfish is known to temporarily paralyze in small enough doses, and it is not completely out of the range of possibility that this poison, along with continued doses of other drugs could result in the kind of zombification that had been reported in Haiti.

From what I have read online, Davis’s claims were not well received by the scientifific community. Very little of the pufferfish poison was actually found in the samples of the zombie potion that Davis acquired. There has been debate on this since, but the fishier element (excuse the pun) to me is the notion of zombification. I can’t find any footage online of actual zombification. I’m not expert on Haiti, but I know that it’s had more than its share of troubles. I find it very easy to understand how stories from a place like this could become twisted and exaggerated. Maybe I’m totally wrong about this, but it seems to me that the entire Haitian zombie phenomena is probably bullshit.

The worst part of this book was that it reminded me of John Russo’s absolutely terrible Voodoo Dawn novel that I read a few weeks ago. I’ve read a few other novels about voodoo (Strange Conflict by Dennis Wheatley and Frank Lauria’s Doctor Orient novels come to mind), but I have to say, the only truly enjoyable book I’ve read that really featured voodoo was Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel.

John Russo’s Voodoo Dawn

John Russo wrote Night of the Living Dead with George Romero. I have been meaning to read something by him for years. I settled on his 1987 novel, Voodoo Dawn.

This was pure garbage. It only took a few hours to read it, but every second of those hours felt as if the author was laughing at me for wasting my time reading his filthy pile of shit.

A voodoo witchdoctor goes on a killing spree in an attempt to make a Frankensteinesque voodoo doll out of human body parts. The premise here is good, but the execution reeks of human excrement. The discussion of the life sized voodoo doll is limited to a few sentences, and the murders take up only a few pages. Most of this novel focuses on the business plans of a gang of up-and-coming advertising executives. It’s shockingly boring. There was a little bit of satisfaction when these boring squares died, but it would have been much more satisfying to witness the author being brutally dismembered with a machete for making me read through his boring, dull, uninspired shite.

At one point the author describes how one of the characters is struggling to flesh out her book on voodoo and how she ultimately resorts to inserting large quotations from other books instead of integrating their main ideas into her work. Russo then proceeds to insert a large quote from one of the books that the character was supposedly reading. He’s literally flaunting his inadequacies to his readers’ faces.

Apparently there’s a movie with the same title that was very, very loosely based on this book. I doubt I’ll watch it. Honestly, avoid this book like you would a leper. It’s a diaper full of diarrhea.

An Introduction to Brian Keene: The Complex and Ghoul

Brian Keene is a name I have seen popping up in horror conversations for a long time. I followed him on twitter and asked him which of his books I should check out first, he courteously responded suggesting The Complex and Ghoul.

The Complex
Deadite Press – 2016

Long term readers of this blog may have noticed that although I have reviewed countless books about witches, demons, aliens, werewolves, and vampires, I have not done a single book about zombies. I’m not interested in zombies. Night of the Living Dead is one of my favourite films, but even as a kid I thought that each sequel, clone and remake (apart from the 1990 one) was a bit less interesting than the original. The characters and settings change slightly, but the plot is always the same – a bunch of misfits are fighting to stay alive in a building surrounded by a horde of the approaching undead. It is a great concept, but I’ve already seen it 100 times. If you like that kind of thing, good for you, but it’s just not my cup of tea.

When Brian Keene recommended I read The Complex, I started it without reading the blurb. Guess what it’s about!

This is the story of a group of misfits fighting to stay alive in their apartment complex while a horde of bloodthirsty, deranged, naked freaks closes in on them. Perhaps these freaks don’t technically qualify as zombies, but they act an awful lot like them.

Ok, so I feel a bit awkward about this because Mr. Keene was polite to me, and I don’t want to be a jerk, but as soon as things got going I realised that this was exactly the kind of horror fiction that I avoid. I kept going with it though, and I reckon I enjoyed it about as much as I possibly could given the subject matter.

This is well written, action packed, easily digestible fiction. I can see why Mr. Keene would suggest it to a first time reader: it’s fun. I may think that I’m too cool to watch The Walking Dead, but I ripped through this zombie-esque novel in two sittings. It’s not my favourite novel ever, but it certainly wouldn’t put me off reading more books by Keene.

One thing that I did notice was that although Keene is woke enough to include a trans character in this novel, he was not woke enough to avoid fat-shaming the main antagonist of the story. Poor Tick-Tock’s weight is very much a part of what’s supposed to make him repulsive.

Ghoul
Leisure Books – 2007

Three boys’ summer holidays are ruined by a corpse eating ghoul that lives in a cemetery. Sounds good, right? Honestly, this felt a bit like Stephen King ripping off Ray Bradbury. That might sound like a criticism, but I like when Stephen King rips off Ray Bradbury. (Think It.) It’s hard not to root for the protagonists when they’re children who like heavy metal. Ghoul was a fun read, but it wasn’t very scary. That being said, I was genuinely surprised at how grim the ending was. The “who’s the real monster?” question that runs through the book is pretty well answered in the final chapter.

(Note: This book should not be confused with Michael Slade’s Ghoul.)

In truth, neither The Complex nor Ghoul blew me away, but they were both enjoyable books. Despite my aversion to zombies, I reckon The Complex is the better novel. I thought it was a bit tighter. I’m planning to continue my series of of horror novels about worms with Brian Keene’s Earthworm Gods in the near future.