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roadworx

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

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Piper Maru said:

An excerpt from Doom Hell On Earth:

Then the thing materialized. It wasn't a recruit for
humanity's army. And it wasn't a zombie, an imp, or
any other old friend. The bastards had sent us a new
monster.

There was something especially odd about the
appearance. This sucker wore clothes! He had on red
shorts and a white T-shirt. At a quick glance, it looked
like a living skeleton in lederhosen. There wasn't time
for a closer look--we already delayed firing a second
too long. The idiotic wardrobe threw us off.
The thing jumped at me, picked me up with one
hand and threw me at the wall. I rolled with the
impact and scrambled to my feet, still holding onto
my twelve-gauge; but before I could fire, the monster
had Arlene in one claw and Albert in the other. Thin
as it was, we were like rag dolls in its hands.
Jill was shouting through the partition, wondering
what was wrong. I would have loved to tell her, but I
was otherwise occupied, waiting for a clear shot.
The skeleton flung Albert down, but kept hold of
Arlene. The angle made Arlene a shield, so I started
maneuvering around, trying to maintain my footing
with Jill's increasingly panicked driving. As I tried for
a better position, the damned bone pile turned and
punched out Albert!

I mean, it hauled off and slugged him, and he went
down for the count. The stupid red shorts suddenly
seemed like boxing shorts. If the invaders were devel-
oping a sense of humor, I knew the true meaning of
horror.


https://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1663515

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Piper Maru said:

An excerpt from Doom Hell On Earth:
--REVENANT HILLARITY ENSUES--

See, I was slogging my way through the second one even though I didn't like it much, just because it was a Doom novel and I'd hate myself if I didn't try to read it. Then this part comes up and I'm like "WTF?". Stopped reading right there and never got to even try the third and fourth one. All because of the way they butchered revenant and made a boxer out of him.

I heard that the 3rd and 4th one are even worse than the 2nd, so it was probably good that I abandoned ship right there.

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Good god, that revenant excerpt is just pure garbage. I have the first three novels somewhere but I refuse to read them. They're just too stupid.

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Ok, I will start to write my own Doom novels soon, I think this must be funny to get some new ideas turning up in my head and re-playing the games too, but this thread and its comments makes me to get the Doom novels again.

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It seems like they are trying to make a joke about that Revenant, about how his armour and flesh look like clothing. But I'm not laughing.

I've not read the books, can't really see it hapenning... >_>

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I know the Doom series isn't plot heavy, but I'm positive if you get good writers you can spin a good story based on the established 'mythology'. Heck I think you can tell a good horror story with action in it. Take the Imp for example, Imps in folklore are supposed to be mischievous demons who like playing tricks on people. I can easily imagine a scene where the Doom marine, or whomever is lured by the sound of someone crying out for help, and turns out it's an ambush by a pack of Imps who were mimicking the vocalizations of their human victims.

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I still think the revenant thing gets a bad rap. I mean, yeah, if you don't like them going with alien invaders rather than demons, I get that. But with that premise already in mind, I thought it was a creative way to explain the new Doom 2 monsters as failed experiments in making human infiltrators. The revenants are mostly bones but wear clothes, the mancubus is the other end (all flesh), and then they finally hit the mark with the chaingunners (who in the novels are all clones).

It certainly isn't the direction I would've gone writing it, but there's an obvious plot thread throughout it that shows there was some planning and creativity involved, and I can respect that.

Jon said:

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 :)


I freely admit I haven't read enough classic sci-fi, so it's quite possible that my lack of exposure to better stuff is why I don't find the novels as bad as others.

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An excerpt from Doom: Knee Deep In The Dead. Here our heroes have found the secret exit in Command Center.

Arlene found a switch that opened a hidden room; we went with the flow.
Entering the chamber, we marveled at how different it was from what we'd
seen before. The entire room was constructed of that black, oily, ulcerat-
ing wood. There was one object in the room, placed at dead center: a bas
relief of a demonic monster more horrible, or more ridiculous, than any we'd
fought. Every physical attribute of the thing was exaggerated so that it
almost seemed to be a cartoon. The largest protuberance of all was its
penis, sticking out at a 45-degree angle.
"They've got to be kidding," said Arlene.
"I hate to bring it up, but that's probably another switch," I
suggested.
"I've handled worse," she admitted.

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The idea of a phallic switch is perverse and entertaining. Touches like that were interesting. But there were too many attempts to realize aspects of the game in ways that were excessively juvenile. Personally, I think there's more to work with, plot-wise, than Doom is generally given credit for. You've got the UAC, a multinational corporation operating outside of Earth jurisdiction by setting up R&D facilities on Mars and its two moons. That alone is fascinating and exploring UAC's history would have been a good move.

Then you've got the marine, whose point-blank sense of morality landed him on Deimos in the first place, plus the various experiments, in particular the teleportation gates, and the sudden appearance of technologically armed invaders. This could have all been handled much more maturely than it was.

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I always thought the UAAF concept from the Doom Bible had potential. Too bad they seem to have dropped the idea even before the alphas were developed.

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Though these novels sucks or not, I admmit the first one had a good potential to start with, but It became silly after Flynn teleported himself to Deimos. I still remember Flynn saying "outerspace is an unsafe place" if I can recall correctly, I really liked when I read that paragraph.

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On the topic of Doom writings, this seems like a good place to mention Impie's novellas. I would recommend them to anyone who was disappointed with the original novels as they adhere much more strictly to the source material, with a very strong horror theme. 

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I remember reading some of Impie's Novellas some years ago, they were worth to read. Good you mentioned them here. I will also write my own Doom novels when I take time, I have some crazy Ideas to add up. 

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On Tuesday, March 07, 2017 at 2:24 PM, Blastfrog said:

"Chapter two in a classic new space opera"

HAHAHAHAHA

ok yeah sure

It's not over until the mancubus sings.

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Wow, those fragments from the novels are some of the worst writing i've ever read on a book, i always thought that they were just average, not this bad.

Been reading impie's novels, never knew of them, quite interesting. I might read em if i find the time to do so 

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An excerpt fro Doom: Infernal Sky. Revenants and Archviles bullying a Demon.

 

Some of the monsters naturally fought each other,
but the bonies and fire eaters had a truce going. The
same couldn't be said for the demon caught between
them, one of the chubby pink ones Arlene likes to call
pinkies. I couldn't help feeling sorry for the thing. The
bonies--Dr. Ackerman called them revenants--were
all lined up on one side in a semicircle. The fire
eaters--also known by a really weird name, arch-
viles--were lined up on the other side, completing
the circle. A bonfire blazed between them.
     The fire eaters could control their fire better than I
realized. They'd send out thin lines of flame that
would burn the pinkie's butt. He'd squeal. Fly always
said the pinkies made him think of pigs.
     The pinkie would jump over the fire and run
straight for the bonies. They made a sound that was
half rattling bones and half choking laughter. They
couldn't use their rockets without spoiling the game.
They seemed to have picked up a trick from human
bullies on a playground. They used sticks to beat and
prod their victim. One had an actual pitchfork he'd
probably stolen from a farm. When the pinkie turned
to run away from his tormentors the bony poked him
in the ass with the pitchfork. If it hadn't been so sick, I
would have laughed. But there was nothing funny
about the pink demon finally falling right into the
center of the fire where he grunted and squealed and
died. I wondered if the bonies and fire eaters would
eat him.

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2 hours ago, DMPhobos said:

Wow, those fragments from the novels are some of the worst writing i've ever read on a book, i always thought that they were just average, not this bad.

In their defense, those are among the two absolute worst moments of writing in the books. The rest isn't good exactly, but it's not quite that bad.

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32 minutes ago, Piper Maru said:

I wondered if the bonies and fire eaters would eat him.

"I wondered if they ate."

 

Yeah, I remembered that off the top of my head. Maybe I've read them too many times. :v

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I think the major issue isn't even the ideas itself but how badly it's written. It reads like something written by a 14 year old. I don't know about you but I prefer to read books written by people who really know how to write. Pick up some Kafka and compare it to this horseshit for instance.

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31 minutes ago, RightField said:

I think the major issue isn't even the ideas itself but how badly it's written. It reads like something written by a 14 year old. I don't know about you but I prefer to read books written by people who really know how to write. Pick up some Kafka and compare it to this horseshit for instance.

I don't know if it's really fair to compare Kafka's classics against pulpy action novels written about a video game.

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Yeah, I mean, a whole paragraph about archviles literally burning the butts of pinkies is just...painful to read. I mean these guys were adults, how did they manage to write such corny shit?

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As poorly written as the Doom novels are (not even including the shameless author self-inserts), I was actually surprised to find that Doom had even got a set of novels in the first place. That being said, though, at least with the first novel, the locations that showed similarities to the original actually were a pretty big positive, not to mention some of the monster concepts were fairly interesting. Such examples include the Spectres not bleeding when shot at, the only appearance of the Pain Elemental where its existence is not only to spawn Lost Souls but also disorient the protagonists with bizarre lights, and the body temperatures of Arch-Viles being hot enough to melt bullets.

Interestingly enough, Doom 2016 actually seems to have taken some ideas from these novels, even if it's only a couple of things.

 

In the Doom novels, Pinkies/Spectres are described as making pig-snuffling sound effects, and Revenants are essentially failed attempts at recreating humans. In Doom 2016, Pinkies/Spectres make snuffling sounds and squeals not unlike that of a pig, and Revenants are essentially former humans that have been experimented with to create demonic supersoldiers (essentially, an inverse of the novel's version). Additionally, Spectres in D2016 have a shimmering and watery appearance that is also described as such in the novels.

As for Mancubi, the guns mounted on their arms supposedly have three mouths that shoot white phosphorus. Both variations of Mancubi in D2016 have cannons with two mouths each that shoot out bile, and the bile from the Cyber-Mancubus acts more like white phosphorus. 

I may be grasping at straws with the last example, but I felt it was worth pointing out.

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On 3/14/2017 at 8:17 PM, Megalyth said:

On the topic of Doom writings, this seems like a good place to mention Impie's novellas.

I started reading these last night, they're actually pretty good!

 

Also perhaps makes me realize my soft-spot for the Doom novels is far more down to the subject matter than the writing quality...

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2 hours ago, esselfortium said:

I don't know if it's really fair to compare Kafka's classics against pulpy action novels written about a video game.

 

Well that's fair I guess, but there's good pulpy stuff and bad. Tarantino (although movies) is a good example how you can do stuff like this right.

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