Apocryphail Phriday: Knee Deep In The Dead

I haven't seen the movie with the Rock.
But it had to be better than this.

In 1993 a video game came out from ID Software that would more or less invent the First Person Shooter genre. This game was Doom. It became wildly popular. This being the nineties, that meant it got spinoffs. And so, in 1995, Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver published "Doom: Knee Deep In The Dead", a full novelization of the first video game in the franchise.

It remains a textbook example of how never, ever to write a video game novel.

The problem is not the hard-on for the Marine Corps that makes Michael Bay look like a weed-smoking flower child. Nor is the problem the confused gender politics and inability to decide whether the heroes are snarky nerds or grunting jarheads.

The problem is not even the network of cliches that renders this story completely and utterly unengaging.

The problem is that this novel, this novel about the most badass Marine in the world mowing down an entire army of demons on the moons of Mars, is terrifyingly, life-suckingly dull.

Dull, dull, dull, dull, dull from Dullsville with a side order of dull and something dull on top.

Let's jump right in, shall we?

I was somewhat at a loss for how to review this novel. Normally on Apocryphail Phriday I just do a review from beginning to end, pointing out all the problems as we go along. But with this novel in order to illustrate the biggest problem I need to go through the whole plot at once.

Unfortunately, Doom Space Marines are not nearly
as cool as those other Space Marines.

In the future, Marine Corporal Flynn "Fly" Taggart of Fox Company strikes a superior officer in an attempt to get him to not kill civilians in Not-Afghanistan. This causes him to be court martialed, but rather than keep him on earth they ship him up to Phobos, moon of Mars, with the rest of his unit, under guard. Then something happens and contact is lost with his unit.

It turns out that Phobos has several mysterious gates that have been there since humans first began using the moons, and now they have disgorged a whole bunch of demon-looking things that have turned most of the people into zombies.

Fly breaks out of the brig and fights his way to a teleporter that takes him to Deimos, which is no longer around Mars, but is being used as a spaceship flying through hyperspace. There he finds Arlene Sanders, his fellow marine whom he has the hots for. They fight their way to another teleporter which takes them to the demon-like alien homeworld, which includes blowing up a massive amalgamation of demonic flesh and mechanical weaponry they call a steam-demon, and they meet Bill Ritch, a computer programmer who reveals that the United Aerospace Company activated the gates in the first place. Bad corporation!

Pictured: Fly and Arlene

By this point Fly and Arlene have noted that most of the demons seem unintelligent, and that they seem willing to turn on each other at the slightest provocation. They hypothesize that there is one overarching intelligence guiding them, and that intelligence is the only thing that keeps them from killing each other. Destroy the intelligence, destroy the invasion. Bill Ritch confirms that there is a "Spidermind", a brain inside a spider-like mechanical body, that seems to be the intelligence behind the invasion.

They fight their way to the Spidermind and blow it up, though Bill dies in the process. The Spidermind's death sets all the demons to fighting each other. They discover that they are in orbit above Earth, but there are signs of battle going on below. The invasion has already begun. And that is a sequel bait ending.

Short synopsis, right? You are probably guessing that I left out most of the story, aren't you?

No. No, my friend. That is pretty much all the story that there is, give or take some minor bits. Do you know what I left out?

Descriptions of the video game.

Page after page after page of Fly going into a room that looked a certain way, and seeing three spiny demons and twelve zombies and two pumpkin demons, and then blowing some up with a shotgun and others with a rifle and using his rocket launcher to take care of the rest.

This room is literally described, in detail, in the novel.
It is far from the only one.

And then on one of them he will find a blue keycard, and he will use it to open a blue door, but then there is a yellow door, so he has to go into another room where there is green toxic goo and a Hell-Prince and three spiny demons and four zombies and a Pinkie Demon and then he has to kill them, and then he finds a secret room where there is ammo for his rocket launcher, and SWEET MOTHER OF JOHN ROMERO WHY ARE YOU JUST DESCRIBING THE DAMN GAME?

What the hell is wrong with these authors? At what point did they sit down and think what their audience wanted, what they really, really wanted, was an in depth discussion of every single room and level of Doom, and just what it takes to get through all those rooms and levels?

I'll be honest, I was pretty young when Doom came out, and I'm not the biggest FPS player anyway, so I'm not sure if the novel can be used as a strategy guide for the game or not, but that's what it feels like!

To be fair, that Mario adaptation might be an improvement.

It's like if someone did a novelization of Super Mario Bros., and decided to give a blow-by-blow description of every goomba trounced, every block hit, and every secret warp pipe found.

For the love of sanity, did Hugh and Linaweaver ever step back and think that maybe this was the stupidest way to do a video game adaptation ever?

And for that matter, they go to all the trouble of describing what it feels like to play the video game in excruciating detail, but then they get the plot wrong! As I understand it, in Doom there are actual portals to Hell, they are fighting real demons, and the protagonist actually goes to Hell in the final campaign. The novel gets rid of that. Why the aliens look like demons is never fully explained, but they are definitely alien. The Hell Princes don't shoot fire from their hands, but instead have wrist-mounted plasma guns. The Spinies don't throw fire, they spit incendiary saliva. It is speculated that the similarity to Earth's demon lore is simply an attempt by the intelligence to freak them out. And while they do go to a place that is described as Hell, Fly and Arlene are never quite sure where they are, and they sort of assume they are either still on Deimos, or on the alien homeworld.

So they get the plot of the game wrong, but spend page after page describing the gameplay of the game, even when that results in ridiculous things, like Hell Princes requiring exactly six rockets fired from a rocket launcher to take down, and taking no visible damage whatsoever until the sixth one hits.

I know, whether Orwell was really
right-wing can be argued. But
this book is generally claimed
as such.

Maybe the authors were just too caught up in the adrenaline and testosterone. And there is plenty of that to go around. I don't know, maybe a right-wing gun nut would like this better, but I like Tom Clancy novels as much as the next guy, and I found this novel to be deadly dull and a little disturbing. There is a lot of military chest-thumping going on here, and snide cracks about manly marine men being better than lesser mortals. And while it's possible some of that is due to an unreliable narrator, very little of it is ever challenged.

I suppose it does not hurt that both of the authors are noted right-wingers, Linaweaver being praised by Ronald Reagan himself, and Hugh apparently moonlighting as a right-wing pundit. But it's not like I don't enjoy a good war story with men and blood and guts and oo-rahs. And plenty of right-wing pro-military authors have written perfectly good books.

But this... I do not like the main character. He seems petty and selfish. They set him up as a moralist in the beginning, when he gives up his career to (unsuccessfully) get a group of monks from being killed by a spineless, weasel-like CO who is set up to be some sort of traitor to humanity, and then is later found as just another corpse, thus giving absolutely no payoff.

But despite the moralistic setup, the rest of the novel he's all about shooting as many things as possible, and trying to decide whether he wants to bang Arlene because she is a good marine, or whether he wants to bang her because she is really hot.

Yeah. Gender roles were... confused in this novel. So confused that I am not certain what I think of them.

At first, I thought the mentions and flash-backs to pretty much everyone treating Arlene as an objectified piece of ass were again showing how good our main character was. He was not just a testosterone-laden jarhead. He realized she was a good marine, and worthy to fight beside him.

Except he seems much more interested in fighting behind her, so he can stare at her perfect ass.

It's a weird dichotomy. Throughout the novel, Fly treats Arlene precisely how two marines should treat each other. Indeed, Arlene seems to be a perfectly badass strong female character. I'm not going to go so far as to say well-written, but she's as well-written as the protagonist.

On the other hand they get their own stamp,
so it can't be that bad, right?

But this is a novel written in Fly's first-person perspective, and his internal monologue toward not only her, but all the women in his unit, is... somewhat piggish. Especially the flashbacks to the sexually-laden hazing given to the female Marines in the unit, which are cringe-worthy. And yet, might be fairly accurate. I'm not a military man myself, but based on news articles I've read it seems like the military can be a rough environment for women.

So can I judge the novel harshly just for depicting that accurately? I'm not sure. Ultimately, if Fly is judged on his actions he is a good friend to Arlene, one with a lot of unresolved sexual tension, but he treats her with respect as a capable person, as he would anyone else, and she doesn't seem to mind the one steamy kiss they have together. If Fly is judged on his thoughts and monologues, he is less of a good friend and more of a near-stalkerish horndog who really cares nothing that Arlene is already in a romantic relationship with a fellow marine.

I tried to find a picture of a bloody woman to make a joke
about how not-sexy it was, but they all sort of grossed
me out. So enjoy this kitten, courtesy of The Onion.

Also, they have the main teleporters work Terminator-style, meaning they teleport naked, and there's an awful lot of sexual-tension-inducing staring at each other's body. That's fair enough. But when Fly waxes eloquent at how hot Arlene looks covered in nothing but the blood and gore of her enemies, or how large and perfect her breasts are while he's dressing a chest wound she receives, it gets a little creepy. Priorities, man. Priorities.

So, take your pick whether this novel is a good depiction of women in the military or not, because I can't figure it out.

I can figure out, however, that whether Arlene is a strong female or not, none of the characters are well written. One second they're grunting like jarheads, the next they are making snarky references to Lovecraft, Kipling, and old sci-fi. Fly will make downright obscure references one minute (especially given the novel's future setting), but then turn up his nose at Arlene's tendency to do the same the next minute, as if he never gets those sorts of references. Whether Fly is fighting his way through hell to save Arlene, or to save Earth, or just because he's a blood 'n guts marine running on testosterone and adrenaline changes from scene to scene. Whether Arlene loves her beau, or whether she secretly loves Fly instead and never cared about her beau, also changes from scene to scene. Indeed, the only thing that stays the same is that the two of them really love shooting things.

And the endless descriptions of corridors, key cards, ammo dumps, and demons being shredded by gunfire is deadly dull.

This is the sort of novel that, if it were a movie, would have Joel and the Bots screaming for it to end.

I reviewed this one because it was recommended to me as good fodder for this column, and to that gentlemen I say: Screw you, this was torture, sheer torture.

And please, my readers, suggest other bits of Apocrypha you want reviewed, because I am nothing if not a masochist.

Joel Robinson would do the best Let's Plays.