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roadworx

so...i read one of the doom novels.

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actually, to be specific, i read some of doom: hell on earth.

i found it at a bookstore in a neighboring town, and i thought it was really a neat find. and it was only $3, so that's even better!

but, uh...WOW. dunno about you, but i thought it was terrible.

i mean, i don't know what i expected - making a book out of a game with little to no plot certainly sounds like it'd be kinda hard to write, but come on. doom is about a single marine being stuck in a dark, lonely space station, where the only thing that accompanies you are demons that want to bite your dick off. from my perspective, when you write a novel about doom, you shouldn't add a whole bunch of bland, uninteresting characters into the mix. you also shouldn't try to ship tease the main character (which i found just as bland and uninteresting as all the other characters) with another bland, uninteresting character. that just seems kinda dumb, especially considering the source material that it's derived from.

one of the stranger additions that the book made was the remodeling of the enemies. they have a more sci-fi element to them, with tech being interwoven with the demons. sure, some of the enemies in the games also featured that, but the novel pretty much makes all of them that way. not only that, but now, they're genetic experiments, kind of like in the movie. imo, it just seems pointless - why not have them be hellspawn? personally, i find the original designs better, and i'm thinking a lot of people would agree with me on that one. or not, i dunno.

however, despite that, i'm still glad i bought it. it's an interesting conversation piece, and a part of doom history - i think that's pretty cool, even if i think the book isn't all that great.

sorry if this seems a bit ranty, i just wanted to share my opinion of what i thought about this with you guys, and maybe even hear some of your opinions. i thought it'd be kind of an interesting topic :)

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I bought the first one, out of curiosity and because one of the authors had previously written one of the best Star Trek novels.

Well, it was just - bad. The authors knew it was trash and treated it like trash, so ultimately it wasn't trashy in a corny but entertaining way, but trashy in a shitty way. I just passed on the rest aftet that.

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I felt very dissapointed when I read those novels, I thought they were going to be good-reads, I have only read the first two.
The first novel seemed to have a good start but suddenly it turned into a mess about Flynn talking nosense about his life, the story, characters and dialogs were really stupid, they scrapped the main point in Doom, demons and Hell.
Their writters didn't know anything about the Doom experience Id created for us.

Edit: I have seen some scans of the other two, Infernal Sky had a good cover by the way.

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roadworx said:

despite all this, i do love the cover


well yeah, the cover is just the doom 2 cover

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That and Flynn obsesses over Arlene Sanders like a straigh-outta-puberty 13 year old boy for 90% of the books.

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I kinda liked the first one, because when there was a description of some location, I could tell exactly what map or part of a map it refers to. That is the main thing that gripped me about it. "Can I recognize some more locations from the descriptions in the book before it ends?" The whole "story" (if you want to call it that) became superfluous after that.

Tried reading the second, but didn't finish it. Found it kind of boring.

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CHALLENGE: write your own Doom novel. Then strip it of all Doom trademark and likeness to avoid legal trouble (but keep the central hell/devil/sci-fi idea). Then publish it in stores. I recommend publishing it in stores because it's more likely to be read than by posting it in the "Creative Works" forum here. Nobody bothers reading free stuff on the internet if it takes too long... but paid novel books are another matter (they're read at different moments during the day than when surfing the web).

How are the Matthew Costello novels? Do they have actual demons?

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^ I could probably have a go at writing one, but the publishing part is going to be a bit more tougher.

I haven't read the Doom novels mainly because my head is stuck in these Halo novels. Would like to read them someday. Until then, more Halo :D

I would do anything for a Doom 64/Doom 2016 novel though. Especially for the Doom 2016 novel.

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Writing new Doom novels, a good one. It is a good idea to me, that's what I always wanted to make. I will be considering this, wishing it keeps the Doom trademark if possible.I have a good start to write the first one.
I also didn't like neither the Doom3 novels nor Doom movie novels, haven't read them at all but what I found on the wiki was extremely disappointing. I prefer the Doom comic over them.

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I've read 1, 2 and 4. 4 is nonsense. 2 is the gateway to the nonsense of 3 (I presume) and 4. But I think 1 is not too bad. It's pulp but fan service.

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The original novels made the mistake of providing a bit too much lore for the demons (and yet somehow not enough), and in my opinion that doesn't really pan out well. Even Doom '16, which is awesome, suffers from this, as the story fails to be compelling when the demons are given a specific history yet we learn next to nothing about what they--and by proxy, Hell--actually are. I think there was mass potential to create something Lovecraftian, where one could evoke mysterious dimensions and unimaginable alterations to the spacetime fabric, or even an Event Horizon-esque plot where inorganic matter somehow becomes sentient and physically manifests the fears of those that are near it. There are really a number of fantastical directions the books could have gone in and they ended up sticking with the "ancient aliens" approach, going so far as to name one of the aliens races "the Freds" which is beyond stupid.

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Dunno about you guys much, but I had liked the novels. All of them, except the last one because I couldn't really figure out what was happening in the ending. The novels remind me of the Forever War, a (in-my-opinion) good sci-fi novel which throws shade at Vietnam War, as the writer was a veteran himself, and he did a good job on making it all "future spacey stuff" instead of just saying "THERE, RIGHT THERE, DEM ALIENS. IMAGINE ALIENS AS ASIANS. BOOM VIETNAM WAR IS HELL" like a lot of other "satiric" novels do (but they dont even try to hide it they just jab and punch away with metaphors).

To be honest, I would like to see the novels as a avanturistic third person shooter (with a shitton of cutscenes thrown in for a good measure). A good weekend getaway game at least.

And if you think the novels were terrible enough, you should just see the cringe I write day to day. Thankfully I don't let anyone read my fiction. This way I can train and have a chance when given a opportunity. Oh well, who knows, maybe I just like cringey and shitty stuff.

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Comparing them to the Forever War is doing FW a massive disservice ;)

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I used to devour the Wing Commander novels, and those at least had some structure to go on. You could replicate various wing mates with various quirks going on various missions until the cows came home. And the Kilrathi were just Klingons with fur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander_(novel_series)

Maybe I was young and dumb, but they seemed pretty good at the time.

Never read any Doom books.

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As a kid I loved the first one, mostly because it took references from the actual Doom levels. You could walk through Hanger, or Containment Zone or Phobos Anomaly and find the actual secrets, halls and rooms talked about in the book. I loved that stuff.

There's a bit later on in the story where they meet a character hanging from the ceiling which they free and talk to, and if you go to that actual room in Hell Keep there's a hanging twitching body exactly where there should be. It's pretty cool.

I also liked the way it starts as a single player game, and then player 2 joins halfway through and it becomes co-op. Me and my brother were inspired to get co-op working and play through the game mostly based on the book.

The second novel is... meh though. It doesn't follow Doom 2 really at all and I barely remember it. I still really like the first one though.

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I actually rather liked the first two of those. Not so much the latter two.

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Sounds just as enjoyable as watching a very bad 80s action romp ripoff such as Invaders of the lost gold, which I had the "pleasure" of viewing recently. On VHS. Dubbed in German. True and sad story.

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First book had some cool things going for it. I really liked the prologue and Flynn Taggarts first contact with possessed marines. The references to the level design were nice and you can almost gauge how far into the episode the character is as you read along.

The talking imp sucked and that the monsters arranged the computers in the shape of a swastika to mock us was really campy. The series descends into retardation by episode 2 when Flynn Taggart finds his love interest, Arlene that hes been pining over for the whole first episode but never makes a move on. The rest of the book is just shooting monsters for fun and cracking jokes and character development. The second book sucked with the new characters and love circle between all the characters. And yes the revenant with football armor and red basketball shorts made me throw the book out the window.

I gave the third book a chance a few chapters in but I couldn't get through it and didn't bother with the last. Its just not fun.

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The books may be almost universally loathed, but I still enjoy them and my soft spot for them will always remain. They're not the greatest books, of course, and I know that much of my love for them is the nostalgia of being a teenager, relaxing in my own little world on a rainy day and reading the books based on my favorite game ever. I haven't read them in a few years, but then, I've read them so many times that I don't really need to, heh.

The first book is the best one, because it sticks the closest to the actual game's locations and visceral nature. The second starts off slow, but once it picks up it stays with it. I still don't care much for the third book, as it dragged on quite a bit. Hanging out on a naval base, hanging out in a space ship, and then hanging out on an alien base comprises most of the "action". The fourth one is pretty strange at times but I find it the deepest and most emotional because of the loss that Fly and Arlene deal with.

I think that the appeal to me now, after having read them a bunch of times and being 20 or so years older, is that the writing and the characters is more "down-to-earth" (to the point of being corny at times), as opposed to the novels based on Doom3, which were well-written but sterile. I enjoyed them also, but it was more like reading an official report of the incident than something seen through the eyes of the characters who lived through it.

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This is obviously an unpopular opinion, but I actually like the Doom novels and have re-read them a couple times over the years. I can certainly understand that a lot of people don't like them as Doom novels - the first book sticks pretty closely to the first game, but the second has only a few recognizable encounters (such as the cyberdemon-vs-mastermind setup from MAP20, reimagined on a moving train), and the third and fourth pretty much move away from the video games and completely into its own space opera territory (except for the 'Flynn in the machine' bit in Book 4). But I actually found the space opera stuff fairly interesting, felt like a lot of classic space opera type weirdness. And it gets REALLY weird (and quite schlocky at points) but I like me some schlock. Ninepin, Sears and Roebuck, the whole human race socially evolving to be terrified of death... lots of memorable stuff.

I know a lot of people hate the idea of them being aliens rather than actual demons, and I can relate... I certainly found them being genetic experiments gone awry rather than demons in the 2005 movie to be lame. But I found the explanation of the Doom monsters being purposely crafted by the alien invaders to play on the earthling's fears to be an interesting take (as well as the idea that humans evolved so fast that when the aliens first met us, it was the Middle Ages and people were scared of fire-and-brimstone demons, and then when the invasion force finally arrives it wasn't as creepy anymore now that we had TV and plasma guns). Some of the other stuff like the Mormons and other side characters they meet from Book 2 on gets weird, but I think fits in with the tale being told... if aliens did invade and governments capitulated, it certainly wouldn't surprise me if the Mormons were one of the last holdouts, heh.

I'm a little more surprised to see so many negative comments on Flynn/Arlene's relationship. I thought it was pretty clear that they were meant to be friends, not lovers; and that Flynn may have had seemingly conflicting emotions but I think that sort of thing is natural in any sort of deep friendship between (hetero) people of the opposite gender. The only one of the relationships of the main four characters I didn't really like was Jill's teenage crush on the much older Flynn, but even that I could see happening in reality (as squicky as it sounds).

So yeah, not good Doom novels, but I think they're decent as schlocky space opera in their own right (with the actual Doom references being a bonus). I think Megalyth's take is actually pretty similar, I know they're not pieces of art but I like them and glad I have them.

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Magnusblitz said:

This is obviously an unpopular opinion, but I actually like the Doom novels and have re-read them a couple times over the years. I can certainly understand that a lot of people don't like them as Doom novels


At least in my case, I'm open minded enough to evaluate them as stand alone works. The first one is probably only interesting in the context of being a doom novel - and that's the only one I like. When I consider book 4 outside of that context, it's a mediocre SF novel and there are hundreds of those already. And lots of good ones that deserve to be read and re-read instead :)

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Knee Deep was great, Hell on Earth was OK, Infernal Sky got weird at the halfway point and I didn't even finish Endgame because of how bad it got and I only got through about a third or a quarter of the novel.

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The writing in itself was pretty good. I think what drove me crazy the most was the dialogue. The relationship between the characters was just too happy and positive. In as much of what ive read anyway. I would have liked to see some rivalries and conflict among the characters but nothing really carried out outside of some petty relationship drama and jealousy and social awkwardness. The battles didn't really seem to be much of a struggle either.

In the first book, Flynn was nearly weeping when he killed the first zombieman. And for several chapters, the inner monologue reads as though Flynn was really frightened and uncertain he'd ever make it out of here alive. It wasn't long before killing monsters was just regular run-of-the-mill busywork. I guess it was to draw parallels to the actual gameplay experience (if you played coop doom, its a ridiculous and easy blastfest)

Idk. It would be fun to write my own doom book but I don't think I have the time.

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I approached the green helmet with a green glow. "Something about this seems spiritual", I murmured to myself. "Maybe if I wear hundreds of these stacked on top of each other, I will be able to resist these genetic mutations."

I grabbed the helmet, which looked almost like an old Roman combat helmet. I placed it on my head and viscous green goo splattered all over my face and shoulders. I could feel the spiritual green goo's power rumbling through my body.


Rofl, the community should try and make a double-down fuckin' stupid Doom novel. Take everything about the real novels that makes them ass and crank it up to 11. It would be hilarious. I only read a few chapters just to get a feel, and it's almost unbearable honestly.

Spoiler

That excerpt isn't actually in the books, but it's no more absurd than the real deal.. Well, from what I've read anyway.

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