Current Reading: Alien

Alien [1979] easily ranks as my favourite horror movie, and one of my favourite scifi flicks. No matter how many times I've seen it, it continues to scare the shit out of me. So I thought, "Hey, if I liked the movie, I should love the book!" While the novelization, by Alan Dean Foster, lacks the impact of many of the movie images, it does convey some of the more subtle emotional moments of a tense and frightening story.

To sum up, if you haven't seen Alien in awhile, the crew of a commercial starship, the Nostromo, are woken from deep sleep to investigate an apparent distress signal. Unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, Science Officer Ash [who, it turns out, is an android] and the ship's computer, Mother, are bound by a directive from the Company, to encounter and if possible retrieve, an alien life form. That plan goes to shit pretty quickly, after one of the crew discovers a form of the alien that attaches itself to his face and turns his body into an incubator. After a small, nasty creature hatches out of his torso in a thoroughly bloody fashion, it hides in the ship growing, while five of the remaining six crewmembers try to figure out how to get rid of it, and Ash & Mother try to protect it. Slowly but inexorably, the alien disposes of all but Ash [who's taken out by ship's engineer Parker] and Warrant Officer Ripley, who ultimately blows the alien into space.

The novelization is pretty much the movie in text form, though there are occasional minor changes. I'm enjoying Foster's writing well enough, though given the impact of the movie, I'm finding it not entirely satisfying. He paints a decent enough picture of the environs of the Nostromo, though he doesn't spend a lot of time on detail. His handling of the crews' internal states and their interractions is concise, illustrating the characters' distinct personalities with minimal verbiage. I love the succession of hints that are dropped early on about Ash's identity and his deception. The confrontations about Ash's loyalty, between Ash & Nostromo captain Dallas, then Ash & Ripley, contain an emotional depth that is not really explored in the movie. This is definitely a case where knowing what's coming does not diminish my reaction.

Among the most powerful images in the movie are the designs of the derelict alien ship and the alien creature itself, in its multiple creepy-as-fuck incarnations. I think Swiss artist H.R. Giger's designs would challenge the most adept writer and, unfortunately, I don't think Foster was quite up to it. As he describes the derelict & creature, they are truly alien, but lack the nightmarish grotesquery of Giger's images.

Though it's enjoyable enough for some tense, quick reading, I'm leaning towards "don't bother" with this one. At least as engaging is the movie novel, released the same year as the movie, and is made up of a shitload of images along with just enough text to fill in necessary story.