By JOEL HARLEY
Church of the Divine Psychopath; Hell Lake; The Jason Strain; Carnival of Maniacs; Hate-Kill-Repeat – Black Flame Press’s Friday the 13th novels got all the best titles. And, of the five books published between 2005 and 2006, FRIDAY THE 13th: HATE-KILL-REPEAT is the one that’s most representative of what’s inside.
Written by Jason Arnopp, this is a less focused story than some of its peers, feeling like three disparate ideas packaged together and connected by one Jason Voorhees. The body count rises quickly and keeps pace until the end, with Jason slaughtering characters major and minor faster than Arnopp can invent them. There’s even a South African psychic thrown in there, too!
Young Halo Harlan serves as the book’s Final Girl figure; a young pregnant woman who encounters Jason while camping in the woods with her abusive partner and his hillbilly friends. In the same neck of the woods, alcoholic FBI Agent Edward Daimler and his partner Melissa van Stadt are on the hunt for a puritanical husband-and-wife serial killer duo who are slaughtering their way across America. And in the book’s third major thread (or fourth, if you count the serial killers as their own entity), corporate man Tom attends a company retreat at a lush hotel that just happens to share a woodland with the old Camp Crystal Lake …
There’s a lot to keep track of, and Arnopp makes a Herculean effort in keeping these plates spinning. Meanwhile, there’s Jason Voorhees, popping up to deliver one grisly murder after another. From local farmers to dimwit police officers – and even a dancefloor full of corporate stiffs – no one is safe from Jason’s rampage.
In characterising their hockey-masked killer, most authors tend to go with either Jason Voorhees: (Brute) Force of Nature or Jason Voorhees: Pissed-off Goalie. Arnopp’s Jason sits (or stomps) through the latter camp, and HATE-KILL-REPEAT finds him in a particularly cantankerous mood after stewing at the bottom of the lake for the last however-many years (references to Tina Shephard would suggest its story takes place not long after Part VII: The New Blood). The author doesn’t linger too much on the bloodshed, with most of Jason’s kills executed briefly and with alarming clarity. Which isn’t to say that this is not a violent novel – HATE-KILL-REPEAT offers up several truly shocking kill sequences; Arnopp’s Jason is just so efficient that they’re over very quickly.
While the fast pace and regular action beats are appreciated, the scattergun approach does wear thin and could easily have lost at least one subplot. Halo’s quest to find her estranged sister is particularly egregious, and Tom’s hotel antics never get interesting, even if it is a novelty setting for a Friday the 13th. Still, it is worth powering through the goofier dialogue and more irritating characters for the book’s more inventive beats. Much of the joy of these tie-in novels is in seeing our horror icons placed in different scenarios than cinema might have time for, and HATE-KILL-REPEAT is of particularly good value.
After all, we’ll never get a film in which a woman hiding up a tree accidentally gives herself away by explosively vomiting all over Jason Voorhees’s head, and for that alone, HATE-KILL-REPEAT is to be celebrated. Fun and unusual imagery like this is sprinkled all over the book (including the follow-up scene, in which Jason finds himself trapped under a felled tree after chopping it down … and dropping it on himself). His early release from his watery grave, meanwhile, is one of the book’s best sequences, and written in a way that slasher cinema could never have done justice.
Taking a throw-it-all-at-the-wall and see-what-sticks approach to the franchise, HATE-KILL-REPEAT is a mixed bag. But for every idea that doesn’t work, there’s another bloody fistful which do.
