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A review by thisisbert
Friday the 13th: Church of the Divine Psychopath by Scott S. Phillips
3.0
Okay, like, what's with all these guns? Let's be perfectly clear. When I pick up a book with a cover photograph of Jason Voorhees looking large and affectless, I do not care to read mainly about army dudes and cult dudes shooting one another. I REALLY DON'T. Your first hint, book dudes, that your readers might have desired to read about hapless teens being dismembered by an unfathomable zombie ghost with an intellectual disability and a great sense for accessories is that this is a book about that very zombie ghost. So there's that. I want more machetes, more eyes getting snipped out with garden tools and more people randomly hurled through the nearest window. I can't think of even one head crushed in this book with the aid of only zombie hands/a basic brown belt. Tragic.
And there are other issues with the book, tbh. The character development is basically nuts. Characters either got zero development or a massive (massive) random infodump telling us their entire life story, and the decision about how to dole out infodump vs blank slate appears to have nothing to do with their relevance to the story or likelihood of resonating emotionally with the reader (readers of this book have the emotional resonance of a large frog anyway so nice try, Phillips). And I'm not kidding about the more machetes, because all these infodumps appear to exist at the expense of Jason time (hint he is meant to be the main antagonist of your novel) and also at the expense of any kind of atmosphere or sensation of fear or foreboding. I appreciate that the showdown -at-the-actually-not-ok-at-all-corral was an attempt to inject some plot into an IP that is basically just about watching people get sequentially murdered, but the author didn't hit the balance between furthering his action plot and maintaining a horror feel, which is an absolute necessity if you want it to be in any way effective or scary. Also not gonna lie I was pretty bummed about the ending one of my two favourites got. You expect them to die but gosh wow.My other fave lived to drink and shake her boobies another day tho.
I always find the insistence that Jason preferentially murders sexy young ladies slightly annoying, as it's not supported statistically on-screen and even when the films play with the trope (e.g. the VR girls in X) it's still not really overtly stating he isn't just killing whoever's there and easy to supermurder, rather than because he has some kind of inappropriate boob response. So it's kind of weird that this book does overtly state Kelly and Meredith are better victims because they're cute and stacked. It probably wouldn't bother me if it weren't repeated a bunch of times and if there weren't other problems like the fact that Jason is a walking exit wound for much of the book. Overall I could have forgiven basically anything if they'd given me more of Jason using his ample skill points in improvised weapons/hand-to-hand skull crushing*. Which is probably why I bought all the other books in this set. Yesss.
Also this answers the question of "do I really have bad taste" (as posed in previous review obviously get with the programme) by already existing on Goodreads and therefore being a Good Read. So I am officially Classy again. Because this book is Classy. Okay.
*Yes, I would have given this 5 stars if the method of defeating Jason had been his own crit fail on a skull crush roll.
And there are other issues with the book, tbh. The character development is basically nuts. Characters either got zero development or a massive (massive) random infodump telling us their entire life story, and the decision about how to dole out infodump vs blank slate appears to have nothing to do with their relevance to the story or likelihood of resonating emotionally with the reader (readers of this book have the emotional resonance of a large frog anyway so nice try, Phillips). And I'm not kidding about the more machetes, because all these infodumps appear to exist at the expense of Jason time (hint he is meant to be the main antagonist of your novel) and also at the expense of any kind of atmosphere or sensation of fear or foreboding. I appreciate that the showdown -at-the-actually-not-ok-at-all-corral was an attempt to inject some plot into an IP that is basically just about watching people get sequentially murdered, but the author didn't hit the balance between furthering his action plot and maintaining a horror feel, which is an absolute necessity if you want it to be in any way effective or scary. Also not gonna lie I was pretty bummed about the ending one of my two favourites got. You expect them to die but gosh wow.
I always find the insistence that Jason preferentially murders sexy young ladies slightly annoying, as it's not supported statistically on-screen and even when the films play with the trope (e.g. the VR girls in X) it's still not really overtly stating he isn't just killing whoever's there and easy to supermurder, rather than because he has some kind of inappropriate boob response. So it's kind of weird that this book does overtly state Kelly and Meredith are better victims because they're cute and stacked. It probably wouldn't bother me if it weren't repeated a bunch of times and if there weren't other problems like the fact that Jason is a walking exit wound for much of the book. Overall I could have forgiven basically anything if they'd given me more of Jason using his ample skill points in improvised weapons/hand-to-hand skull crushing*. Which is probably why I bought all the other books in this set. Yesss.
Also this answers the question of "do I really have bad taste" (as posed in previous review obviously get with the programme) by already existing on Goodreads and therefore being a Good Read. So I am officially Classy again. Because this book is Classy. Okay.
*Yes, I would have given this 5 stars if the method of defeating Jason had been his own crit fail on a skull crush roll.