By JOEL HARLEY
Released in 2005 by Black Fire Press as a part of their Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Jason X catalogue, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: SUFFER THE CHILDREN is the first of five novels starring dream demon Freddy Krueger, on a renewed mission to terrorise and slaughter the young people of Elm Street.
To quote Freddy vs Jason: Freddy’s back. Again.
Written by David Bishop (also known for his Doctor Who, Warhammer and Judge Dredd tie-in novels) the story follows a group of youths who encounter Freddy after partaking in an experimental anti-insomnia drug trial. Led by plucky heroine Alex Corwin, this makeshift Scooby gang must dig deep and harness newfound dream abilities to stop Freddy from striking out to make his campaign of terror felt in the real world.
David Bishop – author of A Nightmare on Elm Street: Suffer the Children
In both setup and characters, SUFFER THE CHILDREN is reminiscent of the franchise films from Part 3 onwards, with the teens developing dream powers following the drug trials and in their subsequent encounters with Freddy. However, in tone, it hews closer to earlier entries – specifically Part 2, with Freddy seeking a real-world avatar for his crimes. It’s a tough balance to get right, and Bishop does a good job of reconciling the series’ wackier turns with its darker, uglier roots. This is also closer to the storytelling of the movies than some of Black Fire’s more ambitious books tended to go – see Jason getting religious in Church of the Divine Psychopath or offing future hippies in an underground lab with Jason X: The Experiment. Where it stands, canonically, is around the events of Freddy vs Jason, with one paragraph apparently referencing Will and Mark’s escape from Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital – and the latter’s grisly death.
The characters are well-drawn and distinct (The Horny One, The Goth One, The Pothead One, The One Pressured by His Parents to Do Well at School etc), realising that the youths of Elm Street are almost always a traumatised and deeply unhappy bunch, struggling with their mental health and various hangups more than those of say, Haddonfield or Camp Crystal Lake. Your mom and dad fuck you up, and no one fucks up their kids more than an Elm Street parent. Except for Freddy Krueger, of course.
“Because I want you two to suffer like I’ve suffered. Because I want everyone to suffer, bitch.”
While the story feels like ‘90s A Nightmare on Elm Street, Bishop’s Freddy Krueger couldn’t be further from the cuddly comic book character he had become at the time. Making the paedophilic implication text, SUFFER THE CHILDREN finds Freddy Krueger in particularly foul fettle – a potty-mouthed, leering child molester and murderer, and one who has only grown angrier and sleazier during his time away from Elm Street.
Although Bishop is successful in making Freddy scary again, he does struggle to find the character’s voice. Relying on the use of the word ‘bitch’ to make Freddy sound like Freddy, the book features a staggering fifty-odd uses of the B-bomb, to the point he sounds more like Rick and Morty’s Scary Terry than Freddy Krueger. The rest of the dialogue, while nasty, doesn’t sound quite like Freddy, although it does admittedly fit the even darker, nastier take on the character. If you squint your ears during some of the more creative swearing, you can almost hear star Robert Englund.
“How’s my favourite bitch feeling today?” he whispered to her, evil eyes glinting with pleasure.
The dream sequences, too, are more grounded than one might expect, largely eschewing flights of fancy in favour of Freddy suddenly appearing out of nowhere to call someone a bitch, make a crude comment about periods or such (“I don’t mind surfing the crimson wave if you don’t!”) and flick his finger-knives about in a pointedly sexual manner. While honing into Freddy the murderous pervert is certainly a take, the more grounded approach can feel like a missed opportunity in the limitless budget afforded by the medium. No longer constrained by film, this was Freddy’s chance to make the dream world his oyster. Sadly, it appears the kids of Elm Street don’t have much of an imagination in either book or film, leaving Freddy to pop up during a dream about school or prom and call someone a bitch, yet again. But what it lacks in scale, it makes up for in brutality, featuring some of the nastiest and most mean-spirited kill sequences in the whole franchise.
SUFFER THE CHILDREN is a slick re-treading of familiar ground, with characters who serve their purpose and a plot which nips along at an efficient pace. Although it never reinvents the wheel, it does end with an interesting twist on the formula – hinting at the beginning of an ongoing thread that Bishop, unfortunately, was never allowed to finish. Publishing is a bitch, eh.
Ultimately, SUFFER THE CHILDREN may not have been quite the Nightmare on Elm Street novel of fans’ dreams, but it is a faithful working of the source material, and one of Freddy’s more shocking outings to date.
