QUICK SHOTS: Friday the 13th Part 3: 3-D by Micheal Avallone

For those who are going to read this in the future just have it known that I timed something out right in life and got this review of a FRIDAY THE 13TH film done and out on...dun, Dun, DUN...Friday the 13th. Hold your applause. This is ground zero for Jason Vorhees in the written word, which is a little surprising to me since the novelized just about everything back in the day. I've covered a few of the YA novels here but this is the first grown-up Jason novel I've read.

This one's got a bit of bad reputation within the Friday fans, most of them don't seem to think my man Avallone got the tone right of a Friday film. And, yeah, they are probably right. This is exactly the reason why I LOVED this book. I'd imagine that most fans of the movies had never read one of Avallone's works before (they're missing out) and they don't quite understand what Avallone puts down when he writes a book. 

You have to look at this way, over coffee or a beer Michael Avallone tells you the story of FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3 3-D and he tells it to you in HIS voice, with little asides, mind wanderings and also probably sticking his finger out almost directly in your eye during the 3-D parts. He doesn't resort to just a bland retelling of a screenplay in a different form, he spins a Michael Avallone yarn with the screenplay as a jumping off point. 

Case in point: the novel starts off with a quote from THE SATAN SLUETH! Avallone's sadly too short series about Phillip St. George III who battles the occult and other monstrosities, a little like SCOOBY-DOO for adults who like whiskey and cigarettes. So, The Satan Sleuth is cannon for Jason to fight now? Where's that book? This sort of thing is fairly common in Avallone's work, his best-known character that loveable private eye Ed Noon shows up in The Butcher when Avallone was writing them too. It's part of why I love his work, but I'd bet it flew over the heads of the kids and teenagers who only wanted to read about dismemberment then and now. 

Now, I also LOVE the FRIDAY THE 13TH movies. For my money they are the sturdiest, meat and potatoes slasher pictures of the 80s. They sort of blend together in my mind sometimes, but I don't think they ever sink to the lows of some of the entries in the other slasher franchises of the time. Having just participated in a podcast where we watched every HALLOWEEN movie from the original to the 2nd Rob Zombie film, I can tell you the highs might be higher with HALLOWEEN, but the lows are much, much lower.

The novelization follows the movie pretty closely, though there are difference since Avallone was working off of an earlier script. Some kids come to Crystal Lake to stay for the weekend, but uh-oh Jason is there. Part 3 is the one where Jason finally gets his hockey mask and were everything is right in the world. Buts it's a "faceless white mask" in the book, still better than a burlap sack. It's slice and dice, and crush and stab past that. Avallone breezes through the book and seemingly had a good time with it. Even though I doubt slashers where his thing. Having read some of his other works in the horror genre like THE COFFIN THINGS and his work in the gothics, he was more traditional in his horror taste I mean he did ghost write for Boris Karloff after all. 

Michael Avallone is one of my favorite writers, I can't seem to dislike a book of his so I'm biased but if you go in with the right mindset, I think it'll be a good time for the reader. Problem is this, like every 80's slasher franchise novel is ridiculously hard to come by and very expensive when you do. Being an Avallone fan this was a my "white whale" for quite a while before I bite the bullet and scooped it up for around $50 which wasn't the worst deal sadly. I'm glad I did though. Sometimes in collecting you have to open your wallet to make the itch go away.

Oh, and no, no parts of this book required 3-D glasses. 

DOUBLE SHOT: Friday the 13th: The Camp Crystal Lake Series by Eric (William Pattison) Morse

Imagine the big three horror-movie slashers, Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger, take a road-trip in some sort of evil-Mystery-Machine and end up on R.L. Stine's Fear Street. Be a fun time for all, I'd bet. But it sorta happened as all three of the gruesome killer got their own series of YA horror novels. These are books I wish I knew about when I was younger, but, hmm, for some reason I don't think they made it to the Scholastic Book Fair. Everything that was once adult became kid-friendly in the 80s and 90s, Toxic Avenger, Tales from the Crypt, even Rambo. I guess it makes sense that Jason, Mike and Freddy did too. Makes me wish that there was a Saturday Morning Cartoon starring Stephen King (as himself) where he tackled all the monsters and evil around his Castle Rock home. Yeah, through in a dog and a van and you got solid gold.

Anyway, the books are hard to get. Like ridiculously hard to get. As I've done a lot of major collecting in the Men's Adeventure/Mystery genres and know I'm really turning my attention to horror, which is proving to be a most welcome challenge to track things down and keep as much money in my wallet as possible. Just got to keep hunting.  

I started with the fourth and final (sorta) book in the series. "Road Trip" finds a group of cheerleaders and football folks trapped on a dark and stormy night at and around Camp Crystal Lake, which sounds like pretty standard stuff, but it's executed (get the pun?) well. This time we mostly follow Summer who's head-over-heels for bad-boy football-player Slick along with a group of dispatchable teenagers, a football coach and one NERD! Since this is a 90's YA horror the Nerd is obviously picked on by everyone, including the Coach and it just gets worse when they blame him for getting their van crashed and stuck on the aforementioned dark and stormy night. So, when the nerd finds the cursed hockey mask of Jason Voorhees, it's pretty easy to see where this is going. 

Along the way there's a detour that seems right out of a Gold Medal paperback or EC comic. A local police officer has kidnapped his wife and her lover with murder on his mind. He drags them out into the woods with a hockey mask, which is a nice little twist at first you might think that the trooper is the latest curse victim/killer. His plan is to kill them both, stage it like a Jason-inspired killing since obviously the whole area is freaked out by Jason, ya know, since everyone keeps getting killed by him. It's a pretty adult story-line for a YA novel and a welcome way to get away from teenage drama for a few pages. Then the novel turns into the slasher picture we wanted as the nerd is transformed by the hockey mask into a hulking Jason-ish killer and starts beating everyone with a tire iron. There's some nice fight scenes, fakes outs and some bits of gore. It's a solid story to go out on, but the series really could have gone on longer...

I read #4 first, just because it was the only one I had, I did have some luck via my good friend Inner-Library Loan and ended up with a copy of #2 "Jason's Curse" which is really a direct sequel to the first book "Mother's Day" (which I haven't read) so there seems to be a thru-line within the series and considering the movies hopped around so much, a little stability is nice. Morse does give you enough dig in with the story without reading the others. AND IT'S AWESOME.

Kelly is out for some Jason-revenge. Bad things happened to her brother in #1 and she's honing her skill to go hunt Jason down for good. Her plan to take her big 'ol hunting knife and pistol out and set traps gets a little muddled when her boyfriend and another couple insist on tagging along...you know because of needing victims. Well, lucky for Kelly a mentally challenged man finds the mask and becomes a hulking killer right before she decides to go so, she has someone to hunt. We bounce back and forth between the conflicted killer trying to grapple with his horrible actions but unable to control himself and slaughtering folks that were mean to him, the normal YA boyfriend/girlfriend drama and Kelly doing a "Home Alone" at Camp Crystal Lake with deadly traps. 

This is a really gnarly book for a YA novel, grisly deaths and a nihilistic tone really set it apart from the regular books from folks like Christopher Pike or Diane Hoh that I read back in the day and well, now still too. Morse actually captures the dark vibe of the films and only waters it down enough to get it published. It's like Splatterpunk for teens. It's a damn shame these are so hard to come by and like have no chance of ever being republished since the "Friday the 13th" rights are so screwed up. I'll be hunting down the rest and probably spending a small fortune on them. Such is life. 

...oh, yeah. There's a fifth unpublished one which is free on the authors website. I guess I'll read that one next.