It's self-published by the author and available on his personal website.
It cleverly ties together the "Friday the 13th" films with the totally unrelated "Friday the 13th" TV series,2 with the author's own "Camp Crystal Lake" novels as a bridge between them. He throws some Lovecraftian mythos stuff in there for flavor, too.
So how is it? Well...
It needs an editor- LOTS of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors.3 There are also some really dumb phrases that a little revision could have filtered out. Behold these zingers:
"But, Steven, you helped Jessica Voorhees send Jason to hell, or supposedly, if you want us to believe such a way out thing." Carol said chidingly.
It wasn't so much the fear that something would happen. It was more the remembered fear of what had occurred before.
Then she noticed the hole, which was nearby the jungle gym. Though it didn't look recent it still struck her interest.
At that moment Phil had wished he could say something because he wanted to inform Lewis it wasn't by choice that he was now a easier target to shoot at.
Micki gave Ryan and the sheriff a dagger stare but kept quiet.4
It's a wild ride nonetheless. Reads like an ambitious low-budget horror film in print. The story picks up right after the end of Morse's last "Crystal Lake" book with the cops cleaning up the carnage from the last guy possessed by Jason's mask. Meanwhile, the media finally notices the town's mysteriously high death rate, resulting in a flock of new arrivals on the scene as new spooky stuff ensues. The hunt for Jason's mask is led by the two leads from the "Friday the 13th" TV show.5
There are too many plots, that's for sure. The documentary crew coming to town is a bridge too far. When you've also got layered flashbacks, complex origin stories, family conflicts, multiple McGuffin chases, Lovecraftian elder gods, a slasher story, multiple possessed people,6 the documentary crew subplot just feels like too many cooks.
But hey, having too much going on is a good problem to have. Flawed as it is, this book is never boring.7
And worth noting- it ties together Jason's antics from every film, including "Freddy Vs. Jason," "Jason X," and even the remake, explaining them all with Jason's mythological and eternal status. This adds a unifying cosmic layer to the proceedings that makes the sum of the films greater than its parts.
Oh, and we're not in YA land anymore. With no restraints, the author really lets the pottymouth and violence rip. This stuff was more fun when it was in a kid's book. It felt subversive and naughty there. Here- eh, it's all just gratuitous.8
It's a bit fuzzy on Lovecraft, too. Characters discuss the man's work, especially the Necronomicon, but it looks more like they're using the Necronomicon from the "Evil Dead" films rather than Lovecraft's. Morse changes the names of Lovecraft's pantheon slightly- "Azagthoth" instead of "Azathoth" and "Cythulu" instead of "Cthulhu," etc.- but we know who he's talking about. So it rings false when characters perform blood rituals and say, essentially, "By the power of Cthulhu, bring this dead boy back to life!"
That's not how that works. Cthulhu cares nothing for blood sacrifices and he has no interest in serving or helping any of us. We're bugs to him. Always have been, always will be. Since the evil forces in this book are trying to sow chaos, it would have at least made sense for the characters to conjure evil up in the name of Nyarlathotep, A.K.A. The Crawling Chaos. Missed opportunity there!
It does manage to wrap up several threads from Morse's previous books. I was happy to find out the origin of the "Hell worms," the mystery behind the Jason altar in the cave, the nature of the town's evil, and the truth about the severed head in the first book. These things matter!
And let's talk about author Eric Morse- A.K.A. William Pattison. If you want to go down that rabbit hole, he's got a blog on his website where he's constantly ranting. He's also on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and does a regular podcast. He's not a hermit.
Online, he primarily complains about getting dissed at conventions, rants about his Wikipedia page being defiled by a vast conspiracy of haters, argues with fans and detractors, and, once in a while, mentions his more recent self-published books. He harps a lot on his four "Camp Crystal Lake" books and says they somehow prove he's the "King of Splatterpunk."9 He has a long, rambling letter on the front of his website where he asks fans to write letters to publishers requesting that his "Camp Crystal Lake" books go back in print.
On that last one- what Pattison fails to realize is that even if his books sold really well and were really popular on their initial release- they're still franchise fiction. A disposable genre, 99.999% of which is just hurled out into the market for a quick buck. Franchise fiction does not stay in print. And it does not get reprints, especially years later.9.5
He's like Uncle Rico in "Napoleon Dynamite," forever fixating on his high school football achievements. It feels like Pattison just never moved on and found something else to do.
As it turns out, he signed his contract without reading it. The author's mother pointed out to him that the contract specified he had to write all four books in one year. He thought he'd have a year for each book. Oops.
He wrote the four books full-time for a year, doing multiple rewrites, and the stress sent him to the hospital multiple times.
So how much did he get paid to write these books?
$1500.10
They promised him a share of the sales but then they never sold. With no marketing and no publicity, none of them even had a second printing.
And that was that.
But these books have a strong voice and there's no obvious reason the writer shouldn't find more writing work.
So what went wrong?
I'm guessing his temper and ego pushed people away. He whines a lot about how the books' editors cut all references to the "Friday" films from the books. He also complains that they made him severely tone down the violence.11 And that he repeatedly tried to lecture his bosses about how wrong they were about everything but that they never returned his calls. So it sounds like he had some social awkwardness issues. Bad communication can kill a career.
The most revealing personal detail in this book, in his words:
"The next day I made the biggest mistake of my life. I asked a lady I'd known from work (I will not mention her name) for three years and asked her out for an Italian dinner to celebrate my book deal. Anyway to make a long story short, three weeks later I was charged with sexual harassment and lost my job...fun...Anyway, as I was looking for a job..."
Wha-WHAT? "Long story short"? Um- no, you need to keep that story long. What was that about? Asking someone on a date doesn't just naturally lead to a sexual harassment lawsuit. Details, please.
The lack of self-awareness and downright creepiness in the way he tells that anecdote is telling.12 But I'll let you draw your own conclusions rather than psychoanalyzing him any more than I already have.
Bottom line- he's a fascinating, odd individual. A tragic figure worthy of Shakespeare.13
I liked his pulpy horror books, warts and all. He wrote the "Camp Crystal Lake" books as a fan- he sure didn't write them for the money!- and he wrote this follow-up book as a fan, as well. All of this was fan fiction, even the stuff he got paid $375 per book on.
William Pattison cared. And that's something.
* * *
1. Unless you count "Fifty Shades of Grey," which started as "Twilight" fan fiction. I read the first ten pages- the pre-sexytime stuff- out loud to my wife and sister-in-law and we laughed so hard we had to stop. We weren't offended, we'd just had enough.
2. How he does this is interesting- the lead actor from the TV show played a different character in the film "Jason Goes to Hell," so the author says this was actually the same person, with occult-induced memory loss. I normally abhor any plot involving amnesia- lookin' at you, season 2 of "Grimm"!- but here it works. It's totally unexpected.
3. He relentlessly uses "it's" instead of "its" and then, as if to troll us, he correctly uses "its" EXACTLY ONCE near the end of the book.
4. And this one: "He wasn't the brightest crayon in the box." This is bizarre. Since when has a crayon's worth been measured by its brightness?
5. Oh, and about that "Friday the 13th" show- it's about a cursed antique shop and each episode has the two leads trying to track down and lock up one of their cursed antiques. "Warehouse 13" took this idea and set it in a warehouse. The Peter Pan episode freaked me out when I was a kid. The rest I saw as an adult and wasn't impressed. David Cronenberg's "Faith Healer" episode was alright, though.
6. One dude gets possessed by the mask just by being NEAR it. Things are cranking up here!
7. Though at 368 pages, it overstays its welcome. His previous "Friday" books were maybe 180 pages each. That's the right length for this kind of story.
8. He even throws in a scene where the Jason-possessee attacks a crowd in a street and more bodies pile up than in several "Friday" films combined. Morse doesn't skimp on the ketchup.
9. Technically, he says a fan gave him this name. I want proof.
9.5. I looked around and found one exception: a 1978 "Star Wars" novel titled "Splinter of the Mind's Eye." But even that one got re-released in 1986, a mere 8 years after its astronomically popular debut. And both releases were timed when the general public was desperately hungry for more stories in that world. Did the general public really have such an appetite for Jason Voorhees yarns? "Friday the 13th" films always seemed like more of a guilty pleasure than something an average person would like to further explore across media platforms.
10. You read that right. Not even $1500 per book. $1500 for all four. A year's work. How much did you make at work last year?
11. They're still more than violent enough, so I'd side with the editors on that one!
12. Not to mention the awkward phrasing and the fact that there's a repetition on "asked."
13. Worthy of "Titus Andronicus," at least.
-Phony McFakename
Great article, learn more about eric morse and his lies at devourmyfootlong.blogspot.com
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