In 1994, YA horror was booming. R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike were cranking out a new book about once a week.1 They all looked like this:
I read a handful of them.
"Meh" is putting it mildly.
I was already wearing big-boy pants and reading grown-up horror by this time. I'd devoured everything by Stephen King, Clive Barker, Dean Koontz, and anyone else who looked interesting.2
So when I dabbled in these teenybopper YA horror books to see what they were about, I quickly realized I wasn't the target demo.
Their horror was diluted by cop-out endings and narrative trickery. No one ever really died. It was always just a dream, a misunderstanding, a hallucination caused by an evil doctor drugging the main character, or an illusion unveiled with a "Scooby-Doo"-ish unmasking ending.3
So I told you that to tell you this. These books came out around that time:
I was understandably dismissive.
I mean, they look exactly like the covers of the wimpy YA horror books of their time, yes?
Clearly, they were aiming for the same audience, yes?
Well...that is why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover.
I just read them and discovered that these books are better, more intense, and more gruesome than almost any of the nine "Friday the 13th" films that preceded it.4
These are the second and fourth entries in the four-book "Camp Crystal Lake" series. "Jason's Curse" and "Road Trip" have the same basic plot. A bunch of redshirts come to Crystal Lake while an outcast finds Jason's mask, puts it on, gets possessed, and hacks away until the redshirts are extra-red.5
"Road Trip" is the weaker of the two. It's got a nerdy football mascot who takes revenge on the cheerleaders and football players who always bullied him. He also whacks a local cop who's in the middle of abducting and murdering his cheating wife and her paramour.6
The middle section drags, with a teenage wasteland of spin-the-bottle games, gossip, and love triangular soap opera antics between the interchangeable catty cheerleaders and their various man-crushes.
There's also some nonsense about vampire bats in a creepy cave with a Jason-worshiping altar. None of that was entirely clear. Who built this altar and why? Bats are never mentioned in any of the "Friday" movies, but they kill almost as many characters as the Jason-possessee in this book. Really- why bats?7
Granted, I didn't read the first or third book, maybe this is all addressed there. But I'm a busy guy so I'll just complain and ask rhetorical questions instead.
"Jason's Curse" is much better. It's a decent horror book by any standard, despite awkward passages such as this:
"Very funny," Miguel told her tensely. He gave her a meaningful look. In fact, he practically went bug-eyed giving her his best angry glare.
But it transcends its weaknesses and feels deeply subversive in the process.
It superficially resembles YA horror- the fonts and margins are large, there's no swear words, the writing is simple and straightforward, and the characters are mostly teenagers doing teenage stuff.
But "Jason's Curse" is an extremely mean machine. It's as intense and graphic as any splatterpunk novel of its time. Right off the bat, a deformed hillbilly murders his parents and feeds them to his pigs, and it goes downhill from there.
Our lead female protagonist brings her friends along to Crystal Lake to get revenge on Jason for murdering her brother.8 And she's actually a believably written human being- which is more than you can say for 99.9% of the characters in slasher films.
There's a fascinating mythos going on here, too. Crystal Lake is well-developed as a creepy and unique milieu. Early on, a local warns the intruding kids that everything in the town is evil and wrong and he's quite believable. There's an undercurrent of dread in every interaction and everyone's words.9
Whatever's wrong with this town goes well beyond a maniac in a mask and the author should be commended for not just randomly hacking up a bunch of teens and calling it a day. This is disturbing and eerie, sometimes on a cosmic level. The "zombie ghost" is a good example- it's cruel and unforgiving and unexplained. Everything about this book leaves you intrigued around the dark edges, wondering what else is going on in Crystal Lake and what's causing it all.
Also- EVERYONE DIES. Main characters, secondary characters, good guys, bad guys. No mercy whatsoever!10
I can imagine the marketing meetings for this franchise: "Hey kids, did you like R.L. Stine's 'The Snowman'? Then you'll love this book where there is NO EXIT BUT GRIM DEATH!"11
Horror narratives work best as roller-coaster rides or trips through a dark fun house. Some are better rides than others, and "Jason's Curse" is as good a ride as they come in this particular amusement park.12
If you like a good slasher story with a sharp supernatural edge, these deceptively juvenile-looking books are for you. They don't make 'em like this anymore.
* * *
1. Now this was pre-"Goosebumps." R.L. Stine made his name with books aimed at teens, not kids. He did this over a decade before Stephanie Meyer castrated vampires for teenage girl consumption.
2. I didn't get to the crazier and more hardcore horror writers until used-books-over-the-internet became a thing. But yes, I did eventually devour Richard Laymon, Jack Ketchum, Edward Lee, John Skipp & Craig Spector, Bentley Little, Joe R. Lansdale, Shaun Hutson, etc.
3. At best, they would acknowledge that maybe something supernatural happened. But MAYBE NOT! YOU DECIDE!
4. Despite that ninth film being called "The Final Friday," there have been three more since- "Jason X" (JASON IN SPACE!), "Freddy Vs. Jason," and an okay remake. Heck, the fourth film was also called "The Final Chapter." Hollywood lies, kids.
5. This all seems to take place in a separate timeline from the "Friday" movies. In the last shot of the "Friday" film before this series, Freddy's glove bursts out, grabs Jason's iconic mask, and drags it underground- presumably to Hell- so it's unclear how the mask found its way back to Crystal Lake. Maybe the author addressed that in the first book in this series, which I admittedly haven't read. But the notion of the mask possessing people is never even hinted at in the films. Jason doesn't even put on the iconic hockey mask until halfway through the third film in the series. The ninth film went totally off the rails and implied that the true evil entity behind all the mayhem is a big slimy worm that crawls from person to person by mouth, randomly possessing them, and thus implying Jason was just another vessel for that thing. That theory has been met with skepticism and dismissal by most respectable "Friday the 13th" scholars.
6. Who on Earth thought 13-year-olds could relate to THAT subplot? Answer: Eric Morse. You should check out his somewhat primitive-looking website, it's neat how totally proud he is of his work with this series: http://authorericmorse.webs.com/ He even reveals that he wrote a follow-up book to this series- unpaid fan fiction, basically- where he ties the Jason mask mythos in with the short-lived "Friday the 13th" TV series, a totally unrelated show about an antique shop full of cursed artifacts (And the mask is a cursed artifact, so that's a pretty good fit!). Morse wasn't just some hack who wrote this stuff for a paycheck and is now ashamed of his horror ghetto past. He's a real fan. In fact...Morse seems like the kind of dude who regularly checks Google Alerts for his name or the titles of his "Crystal Lake" books. So he might actually be reading this. Hi, Eric Morse! You did a pretty good job with these books and everyone I know who has read them also enjoyed them. They've stood the test of time better than any YA horror of its time. Props.
7. Author Eric Morse- seriously, if you're reading this, holla at your boy here and answer this- why bats?
8. A character also did this in the fourth "Friday" film and in the 2009 remake. The main character started the sixth film seeking revenge on Jason, too. This almost never ends well for people. I don't recommend it.
9. At times, this thick atmosphere even reaches the heights of classical horror from the 20's and 30's, when Lovecraft and his contemporaries started the whole "doomed town" trope; there's a mysterious and unspeakable evil only gradually unveiled and the protagonists are helpless to resist. What is implied here is just as disturbing as what is presented. The author is hunting bigger game than you would expect from franchise fiction.
10. "Road Trip" is pretty intense, too, but it has the more traditional ending where the main couple survives and rides off into the sunset together. But hey, you can't kill all the people all the time.
11. If anyone reading this blog happened to read "Jason's Curse" when you were a kid, I'd like to hear about how it traumatized you.
12. Confession: Good as "Jason's Curse" is, it reminded me why I don't watch slasher films anymore (And I've seen a LOT). There's something fundamentally hopeless and nihilistic about a narrative where everyone's just a domino to be knocked down. The stakes amount to the catchphrase of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre": "Who will survive and what will be left of them?" When you engage with a story, you want to share the hopes and dreams and struggles of your protagonist. When all you have to work with is "Are they gonna get whacked or not?" then that doesn't give you a lot to work with.
-Phony McFakename
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