Books of 2024: Week 10 - Friday the 13th and Friday the 13th Part 2

Cody reads a pair of Friday the 13th novelizations.

FRIDAY THE 13TH by Simon Hawke

When Friday the 13th Part III was released in 3-D back in 1982, the film was such a big deal that Paramount Pictures even hired Michael Avallone to write a novelization. Four years later, they hired Simon Hawke to write a novelization of Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI – a film that brought iconic masked slasher Jason Voorhees back from the dead after he remained in the grave (and in the hallucinations and nightmares had by the lead character) throughout the fifth film. That book must have sold well, because Paramount quickly hired Hawke to write belated novelizations of the original Friday the 13th and Friday the 13th Part 2... and even a second novelization of Friday the 13th Part III. Sure, why not? These books are long out of print and increasingly hard to find, with used copies going for hundreds of dollars. Even as an obsessive fan of Friday the 13th franchise, I can’t tell you they’re worth the prices they usually go for. But if you manage to come across a copy for a more reasonable price (or if you just manage to find the text from the books somewhere online), they are a fun read. 

For the novelization of the first movie, Hawke packed the story into 192 pages, sticking close to what we saw on the screen. Sometimes novelizations are written from shooting scripts and therefore have scenes that were written for the film but didn’t make it into the finished product, but that’s not the case with this book. While the beginning of the film is different from what Victor Miller wrote in the screenplay, as it was originally envisioned as having a more elaborate opening sequence, Hawke wrote what we see in the movie, not what was in Miller’s script. Scene by scene, the book follows the movie through the story of a group of hapless young people gathering together at Camp Crystal Lake to get the place ready to open for the first time in over twenty years, then getting knocked off by a mysterious attacker one-by-one. Hawke stuck so closely to the movie we’re familiar with, he even resisted the temptation to fix the dialogue error where camp-cook-to-be Annie refers to the incoming campers as “kids,” then soon after says she hates when children are referred to as “kids.”

Of course, the book isn’t just the movie scenes translated into prose, as Hawke was able to drop in moments here and there where we get insight into what some of the characters are thinking in certain moments. As someone who has watched Friday the 13th many, many times, I was surprised to find that Hawke had a very different read on the characters and their interactions than I did. For example, he has the Brenda character actually being charmed by Ned’s prankster / joker antics, and even laughing after he tricks her into thinking he was drowning just so he can kiss her when she’s giving him mouth-to-mouth. I don’t think the movie Brenda appreciated that at all, and she seemed to grow increasingly tired of his non-stop goofery. According to Hawke, the sex scene we see between the Jack and Marcie characters was the first time they ever had sex with each other. I doubt it. And when Jack is relaxing with a joint afterwards, Hawke imagines that he was worried, wondering whether or not Marcie was on birth control. He looked pretty chill to me.

So I don’t agree with Hawke’s view of the characters, but I still enjoyed seeing one of my all-time favorite movies get turned into a book.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 by Simon Hawke

Five years after the events of Friday the 13th, a counselor training center is opened in Crystal Lake. That turns out to be a very poor choice of location. The killing spree carried out at Camp Crystal Lake by Mrs. Voorhees – a middle-age woman seeking revenge for the drowning death of her son Jason – may have been brought to an end when the last surviving counselor decapitated Mrs. Voorhees with a machete, but somehow Jason is still alive. He’s living in the woods, hiding his face under a white sack, and ready to kill anyone who ventures into his territory.

As with his novelization of the first movie, Simon Hawke sticks close to what we saw on the screen for his take on Friday the 13th Part 2, going through the story scene-by-scene but also taking the occasional opportunity to find out what characters are thinking in certain moments. His read on the characters doesn’t differ from my own as greatly this time around... although I’m not sure about his idea of what Jason is thinking and feeling in some of the moments where he goes into that character’s mind. I really disagree with his idea of Jason’s childhood. He imagines that Jason had a hateful, potentially evil edge to him from the moment he was born. I don’t like that idea; that’s too Michael Myers for me. Jason may have looked different from the other children, but I’d like to think he was a good kid before the tragedies.

There is a Jason passage that would probably be of great interest to a lot of fans, and that’s when Hawke tries to explain how Jason can still be alive when his mom was previously out to avenge his death. He tells us that Jason did drown, but eventually rose from his watery grave – a resurrection apparently attributed to an ability he always had to heal very quickly from any injury. Including death, as it turns out. Jason returned to Camp Crystal Lake while regenerating his rotting flesh and accidentally burned down a cabin or two. When people showed up with the intention of re-opening the camp, he had to retreat to his own makeshift shack in the wilderness. From the woods surrounding the camp, Jason witnessed the murders committed by his long-lost mother. Then saw her get decapitated. So now he’s out to avenge the woman who died trying to avenge him. That was always a logic gap that had to be overcome to enjoy Friday the 13th Part 2 (and I never had trouble making that leap, because it’s an awesome sequel), and Hawke did an admirable job of trying to fill in that gap.

If you like Friday the 13th and Friday the 13th Part 2, chances are high that you’ll like Simon Hawke’s novelizations of the films. Just don’t pay high prices for them.