‘Terrifier 2: The Official Movie Novelization’ – Tim Waggoner (Titan Books)

I’ve been enjoying the ‘Terrifier’ franchise (which sounds slightly weird if you’ve seen the first ‘Terrifier’ movie but hopefully you know what I mean!) so when I saw that there was a novelization for ‘Terrifier 2’, well… There was no way that I wasn’t going to pick it up. As you already know, I have a soft spot for movie novelizations (it’s a childhood nostalgia thing) and you’ve got to support stuff if you want to see more of it so… That was that.

Now, I’m not as quick a reader as I used to be but I can still zip through books fairly quickly. This one though, not so much… Twelve days after picking it up, I finally finished it yesterday afternoon. And now I’ve got my head round it a little bit, let me tell you about it...

It has been one year since the sleepy town of Miles County survived the murderous spree of demented killer Art the Clown, but little do they know the nightmare is about to begin anew.

Resurrected by a sinister entity, Art is back with an appetite for murder and mayhem—setting his sights on the recently bereaved teenager Sienna and her younger brother Jonathan. The streets are about to run with blood, and Sienna must somehow survive this gruesome Halloween night and discover how to defeat a brutal and unforgiving killing machine from beyond her nightmares.

There's no stopping Art once his sights are set on you…

There is a lot to enjoy about ‘Terrifier 2’ although I should probably qualify that… If you enjoyed the movies, there is a lot to enjoy about ‘Terrifier 2’ in its book form ;o)

What we have here is a faithful retelling of the movie; there isn’t a lot in the way of plot (because there wasn’t in the movie) but what there is makes sense and is easy to follow. You don’t need a lot more than that really, ‘Terrifier 2’ was all about the ‘shock and gore’ on screen and so you can guess where the book is going can’t you…?

And this is where Waggoner really comes into his own. I mean, he’s got some pretty heavy hints to write by but he’s more than up to it, he certainly doesn’t hold back in applying a more than liberal dose of gore to each page that Art the Clown is on. This is what ‘Terrifier 2’ is all about :o)

It’s not just that though, Waggoner is more than up to adding a few little tweaks here and there; not taking away from the plot but rather enhancing it instead. The body count actually goes up a little but what I really enjoyed was Waggoner’s ability to give us a little glimpse into the deranged mind of Art the Clown… but not actually give us any background on him at all. That sounds weird, I know, but it really works. Waggoner emphasises that Art is a creature of chaos that works to no plan whatsoever, just reacting to whatever is in front of him (normally killing it). At this stage, we don’t need to know any more than that and this approach just works, it adds an element of unpredictability to a character that we thought we knew and that really helps the book as a whole.

Having said all of that though, ‘Terrifier 2’ wasn’t the easiest book to get through and I’m not talking about the kill scenes either. The movie has an energy about it that pushes you through the ‘non-Art’ moments; the book though… not so much. While it’s not a deal breaker, the pacing of the book feels a little ‘stop/start’ as we’re spending a little more time on family scenes etc than we did in the movie. Ultimately, that’s why it took me as long as it did to finish the book off.

Having said that though, I still find myself hoping for a ‘Terrifier 3’ novel and for Tim Waggoner to write it. Waggoner has a real feel for the setting and exactly how much blood is needed to cover it (all the blood); the execution of the plot just needs a little fine tuning is all.