I am a huge fan of novelizations and tie-ins. When I was a kid, I picked up Star Wars books at every library book sale and happily read the novelizations of movies I was anticipating, always wishing that there were books based on my favorite horror movies as well—not knowing, of course, that some already existed at the time. When I discovered the Halloween Young Adult books as a kid, I was hooked forever. So I could not have been more excited in the mid-2000s, when the publisher Black Flame Books began putting out novels based on A Nightmare on Elm Street, Final Destination, Friday the 13th and, of all things, Jason X. And by the time Black Flame did this, I was already well-versed in just how rare books like this would become, so I snatched up every single one. It was amazing to get new stories based on these characters, especially after Freddy vs. Jason, when we were starving for news of a new movie. But looking back as an adult, the thing that still stuns me most, that I cannot believe and am so grateful for, is the fact that we were treated to an entire Jason X-panded universe of novels and three comic book issues.
Jason X was not a very successful entry when it first hit and was not even that well liked among fans at the time. With Freddy vs. Jason coming out only a year later, it very quickly became a weird footnote in the franchise’s history. Over time, fans have certainly come around on the film’s tongue-in-cheek absurdity and refreshing sense of humor, but that wasn’t so much the case when it was still new. The very fact that a series of Jason X novels ever even happened is completely bananas. That’s the thing that makes all of this so fascinating. The existence of these books is weird enough. But the content of the books goes so very, very far beyond that. Even as weird as they are for simply existing, these novels are so much weirder than you could probably ever imagine them to be and that’s why they desperately warrant an in-depth look. Most people will probably never get the chance to read them, but I can’t let them be lost to history without letting the good people know that they absolutely redefine the term “bonkers.”
That redefinition honestly starts right with the novelization of the original movie. For one thing, there’s the fact that, while the film came out in 2002, its novelization came out in 2005. That’s a long time between the two and definitely worth noting when so many novelizations are rushed to tie in to a film’s specific release date. It’s also worth noting the difference in tone between the two, because of that. While there definitely is a sense of humor in places, Jason X the novel by Pat Cadigan, is a completely different beast tonally, even if the characters, major beats and even most of the dialogue are the same. Whereas the movie is a fun indulgence of mayhem that doesn’t take itself remotely seriously, the novelization utterly wallows in hopelessness and nihilism. For example, the book dives much deeper into Professor Lowe as a character, revealing that he faked all of his credentials and that the university has found out. The class he’s running is a total scam, he’s about to be fired and is possibly facing prison. Even worse: the whole class is going to be expelled for their participation in Lowe’s fraudulent class upon return to the university, and they have no idea. From the moment we meet them, their academic lives are over and they’re clueless. But it gets worse. When Lowe realizes the value of Jason’s frozen body, desperate to not come out of this situation empty-handed, he decides that he is going to kill the entire class to keep the discovery of the frozen corpse to himself, making this the only Friday the 13th where everyone dies even if Jason is never resurrected.
There are plenty more bizarrely specific details in the Jason X novelization. First, there’s an extremely Friday the 13th explanation for the huge leaps in technology in 400 years. At some point, humans apparently made first contact with aliens, and those aliens gave us access to their technology in exchange for something of ours: marijuana. In exchange for introducing E.T. to the devil’s lettuce, humankind received technology that allowed us to colonize space, eventually even inhabiting another planet entirely after Earth was finally deemed uninhabitable. Janessa, it is also revealed, is a celebrity. She is extremely wealthy and is famous for being the first successful genetic birth from three parents. The novelization—as is the case with all of the Jason X novels—is over 400 pages, so there’s truly no stone left unturned. If you want to know the background of the “Microsoft Conflict” you hear about in the film, you’ll get a detailed history over several pages. The short version is that it was an actual war and once it ended, all of the survivors received full shares in the company. When Tsunaron and the android Kay-Em are implied to have sex right before she suits up to take on Jason, it is much more explicitly stated—and detailed—in the book.
After the novelization of the movie is when things get really interesting, though. Jason X: The Experiment is the first original novel based on Jason X, the first of surprisingly several sequels to a movie that sadly never got one in film form. It’s also wild, but compared to what comes later, also somewhat restrained. It turns out that the lake Jason crashes into is next to a huge nuclear power plant, which environmental activists are trying to shut down. Jason (or UberJason, rather) is out of commission for a good deal of the book, but what we lack in mayhem we make up for in lengthy philosophizing on Jason’s position in the universe as the “embodiment of anti-life,” devoting himself to the extermination of living matter.
There’s also something anticlimactic to the notion of life on Earth-2 being pretty much identical to 21st century life on Earth-1. Jason does get a pretty imaginative foe, at least in theory, in an sort of recreation of his own nanite-enhanced existence. The nanites reassemble the scraps of several dead bodies into a Frankensteined form that grows stronger by adding hunks of dead flesh to its own. Every time Jason kills, this thing only grows more powerful. Unfortunately, this barely even comes about until pretty much the end of the book. The slasher element is abandoned pretty early on, which is obviously not great for a Jason novel, while the environmental plot takes over.
The next novel, Nancy Kilpatrick’s Jason X: Planet of the Beast takes place on Planet #666, where the evil Dr. Bardox is working tirelessly to clone Jason so that he can have an invulnerable killing machine totally under his control. It goes about as well as you’d expect. More than anything, though, is the fact that this novel actually—for its entirety—refers to the character as Jason X. Not Jason, not UberJason, it’s “Jason X entered the room.” Imagine if any of the other movies did that. Imagine reading “Suddenly, Jason Goes to Hell burst up through the floorboards, more powerful than ever.”
Having said that, this one’s not so bad. Nancy Kilpatrick is no joke of a writer, not that any of the other Jason X authors were, and was even referred to in Fangoria as “Canada’s Anne Rice.” There’s deeper characterization here, much more action, and this is probably the book that comes closest to the highs of Black Flame’s other Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street novels when they were at their best. This Jason has also been completely remade, so while it seems out of character for him to move much faster and be somehow even more malicious in his attacks (Jason does a lot more torturing of his victims than he ever did in the past) it makes some degree of sense when taking into account that this is kind of an Uber-UberJason.
The fourth Jason X novel, Jason X: Death Moon, is the cream of the crop. I sanction the buffoonery of all these books, granted, but this one without a doubt has the most buffoonery to sanction. I’m in awe of it. In Death Moon, author Alex S. Johnson decides to bring the far-future antics of Jason X back to its camp roots. This novel is primarily set at Moon Camp Americana, a camp for wayward girls. There’s nano-everything this time. Nano-flies, nano-spiders, you name it. There’s a plague of nanite-enhanced zombies. There’s the resurrection of Pamela Voorhees. There’s a virtual reality fight between “classic” Jason and UberJason. And yet nothing that happens in the novel holds a candle to the way it is written.
Here’s a passage from Jason X: Death Moon. Possibly my favorite passage from any book. You cannot get a sense for what the book is without reading this:
“Bite me, Jason’s body would say if it spoke. But Jason has no need for speech. While not a strong suit, Jason might reach back in his early memory for rudimentary language, a thing of gasps, grunts and sudden fetal tyrannies in the manner of Richard the Third. Jason has no need for speech. He is Mr F***. The Endgame Man.”
The whole book is written like that from beginning to end, making it kind of hard to even know what’s happening at times. Especially when Johnson will, with some regularity write “He said this” and follow it up with “No, just kidding, he actually said this.” He will even do that with, of all things, characters’ names. The book also stops dead in its tracks for an anecdote about Elsa Lanchester that goes on for several pages. And that’s great, honestly. Good for it, because I’m not sure this book would be half as memorable if it were remotely digestible or made a lick of sense.
Amazingly, the Jason X novels are the only Black Flame books with any degree of continuity between them. The Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street novels have nothing to do with one another, each of those books completely stands alone. Jason X, however, is a true series, and events and locations are picked up and touched upon from one book to another. This is made abundantly clear in the final book, again written by Nancy Kilpatrick, Jason X: To the Third Power. This one returns to Moon Camp Americana, from Death Moon, which has since been remade into a maximum security prison. This is set roughly twenty years after the events of Death Moon. Jason invaded the moon base—which the prison has now been built on top of—and corrupted the system’s AI, becoming a computer virus, and his presence still lingers, though Jason himself doesn’t fully enter the fray until the second half of the novel.
Thanks to the wonders of cloning and weird DNA experiments, at the end of Jason X: Planet of the Beast a character basically learned that she was pregnant with Jason’s biological child. That comes up again, which is not surprising as Kilpatrick wrote both books. Now Jason’s son steps into the role of protagonist, learning what he is and hoping his genes have the key to surviving, if not destroying, his father. This book sees not only Jason, but a Jason II and Jason III, as Jason rebuilds himself and one Jason is effectively made to combat the first. It even contains the line, “The one I made? He’s the new Jason? The strongest Jason ever?”
Of course, these five novels aren’t the only other Jason X stories out there. There are also three comic book issues from Avatar Press. Around the same time that Black Flame picked up the rights for novels, the comic press Avatar started putting out Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and Texas Chainsaw Massacre comics. In the midst of those were a Jason X one-shot and the two part miniseries Jason vs. Jason X. The one-shot, written by Brian Pulido, picks up immediately after the ending of the film, with UberJason crashing into the lake. Kristen, our hero, is hoping to harness Jason’s regenerative capabilities to save herself and her loved ones. Jason now has control over the nanites that have taken over his body, basically just using them to build a new machete at his will. The ghost of Pamela Voorhees also gets into the ship’s computer. It’s a lot packed into thirty pages, but the highlight is UberJason killing the couple from the end of the movie who went to investigate the “shooting star” in the lake, by throwing an entire tree at them.
The follow-up miniseries, Friday the 13th: Jason vs. Jason X, is no less wild. One would imagine that if UberJason were going to face off against his classic self, time travel would be by far the easiest way to accomplish that. But that is not the approach that writer/artist Mike Wolfer takes, not at all. UberJason has now found his way to the party ship, U.S.S. FunClub, where he proceeds to wreak his regular brand of havoc. At the same time, a salvage crew finds the remains of the Grendel and when they get the power going again, the nanites resume their work, taking the scraps of Jason meat that somehow weren’t incorporated into UberJason the first time around and now assembling them into an exact duplicate of the original Jason. Basically, in terms of the title, the “Jason X” is the original Jason and the “Jason” is the duplicate. It’s the Ship of Theseus of slasher comics. Regardless of which is the “real” Jason, the two of them do not get along, despite how much they have in common. A fight is inevitable, and unlike Freddy vs. Jason, there’s no room for debate. UberJason obliterates his newly minted counterpart, tearing his head apart with his bare hands and even adding classic Jason’s brain matter to his own, to further enhance himself.
Many tie-in novels to horror franchises get up to some weird stuff. That’s true even strictly of Friday the 13th books in general. There’s a whole series of Young Adult books about people being possessed by Jason after finding his mask in the woods. There’s a novel, Carnival of Maniacs, which opens with a couple of cannibals finding Jason’s decomposing, festering body in the forest and deciding they’re gonna take it home and eat it. Those things do not hold a candle to how weird and wonderful the Jason X books are. There are better, sometimes even really good Friday the 13th novels, such as Church of the Divine Psychopath and Hate-Kill-Repeat in particular. I don’t think the Jason X books quite hit that level, but I love them all the same, because while they might not always make sense or feel remotely connected to the overall franchise at times, they are unashamedly, utterly weird. These authors are never not doing their own thing with this property, whether it be an environmental statement or a lengthy aside on Elsa Lanchester. They don’t give one single, solitary Mr F***, and for that I could not possibly be more grateful.