I read and reviewed Jason X: The Experiment, the second of five tie-in novels that were based on the futurist Friday the 13th series entry Jason X - the movie that not only shot Jason Voorhees into space, but that also turned him into a bad ass looking cyborg - almost five years ago.
Five years is a very long time. So my telling you that I remember very little of the book should come as no surprise whatsoever. All I remember about The Experiment is that it read like two different books that had been cut and pasted together in the most clumsy manner possible and that the book ended with the cyborg Jason being shot off into deep space.
Nancy Kilpatrick's Planet of the Beast
The Black Star 13, now a blood drenched ghost ship, shoots through space on a collision course with another deep space exploration space station, the G7, which is orbiting the barren Planet #666, the Planet of the Beast. (No, I am not making this up to be sarcastic, honest.) The G7 is hosting a visiting ship called The Revival, another deep space explorer, that goes out to investigate the Black Star 13 and search for survivors. Jason slaughters the rescue team and the entire crew of The Revival and both ships crash onto the surface of Planet #666.
And that is just the book's Prologue!
The rest of the book is just as silly as the Prologue, albeit not as fast paced. The man in charge of G7 is an arrogant, and quite mad, scientist that knows the history of the unkillable "Jason X". Said scientist wants to clone Jason and create a "Master Race" of "enhanced" human beings. Yes, he is very much aware of the disaster that befell the fool that tried that very same thing in The Experiment. But, being both arrogant and insane, this new guy thinks he is smarter and better than the doofus that goofed up it all up last time. Yeah, right.
On the plus side, author Nancy Kilpatrick keeps the pace somewhat brisk and she even comes up with a rather ingenious method of "livening up" the Jason free sections of the book. One of the characters (and I do use the description "character" loosely) is a storyteller who tells holodeck campfire yarns about Jason's past exploits. So, long before Jason shows up to dispatch the listeners with his trademark finesse, the reader gets one or two carnage filled vignettes to wet the appetite. Kilpatrick also knows how silly this all is and, despite maintaining a straight narrative face throughout the book, it is quite clear she has her storytelling tongue lodged firmly inside of her cheek.
On the negative side, the book is a tad bloated and repetitious. It takes far too long for Jason to get off of the Planet of the Beast and onto G7, and far too many scenes feel needlessly dragged out. (Again, the blame for this falls on the publisher, not the author.)
Nonetheless, Planet of the Beast was one of the more entertaining entries in this short-lived tie-in series.
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