‘Aliens: Nightmare Asylum’ – Steve Perry (Titan Books)

 


Page Count: 271 Pages

Well, yesterday wasn’t the ‘day of reading’ that I’d planned; more like a day of playing on my phone (with an ill-advised break for a scary movie that wasn’t scary at all) and trying to stay awake. It did get to a point though where I thought, ‘if I don’t read something now…’ and resolved to do something about that. The immediate TBR pile wasn’t particularly inspiring so in the end, I figured I’d go back to the ‘Aliens Omnibus’ and see what happened after Wilks and Billie escaped the Alien home world. ‘Earth Hive’ had its issues but there was enough there for me to want to keep reading. Turns out that it was a good choice of mine :o) ‘Nightmare Asylum’ was a big improvement on ‘Earth Hive’ and all of a sudden, I’m back in the groove again.

Billie, Wilks and Bueller (well, half of him anyway…) have escaped the Alien home world, on board a pre-programmed robot ship, destination unknown. They will eventually make it back to Earth but not until they’ve spent some time at a secret military facility, run by an insane General with a unique plan to rid Earth of its Alien infestation, Is fighting fire with fire really the best way to deal with Aliens though…?

‘Nightmare Asylum’ is a lot more tightly focussed than its predecessor, which I suppose is only natural given that despite my issues with its approach, ‘Earth Hive’ was very much about setting things up. Things have kicked off now though and the plot is free to concentrate on what happens next for Billie and Wilks, both of whom are trying to make sense of their place in the unfolding events. Both are fighting all sorts of trauma anyway, which is bad enough, but what’s worse is that they have to do this and fight Aliens at the same time. Bad for them but good for those of us who are reading along. There is a lot of reflection and a lot of action, all at the same time, and you really get to see both leads move through it and develop.

Add a whole load of ‘Alien action’ to the mix and ‘Nightmare Asylum’ swiftly becomes a ‘Greatest Hits’ of ‘Alien’ and ‘Aliens’. Not in a way that feels forced, or a ‘rip-off’, though, Perry takes familiar encounters and makes them all his own. We get ‘Aliens on a Spaceship’ and ‘Aliens vs. Colonial Marines’ but done differently enough so that you don’t necessarily think ‘I’ve seen this before…’ We also get General Spears and that’s where things get really interesting…

General Spears’ character is essentially more commentary on humanity’s greed and arrogance, seeing the Aliens as an easily controlled source of profit. What really pushes the plot to new heights though is that he is absolutely insane and paranoid enough to be a military genius, a real challenge for Wilks in particular and a character that really kept me on my toes throughout. Anyone working for Spears (or anywhere near him) is likely to end up in the ‘Alien breeding programme’ if they make a mistake… or sent on their way and told to do better next time. No-one really knows (I suspect not even Spears himself really knows) and that’s what makes any section with Spears in it very memorable. And seeing him lead his ‘soldiers’ into battle, at the end, makes for a brilliant finale to his arc, even if you know what’s coming. I’m not a hundred percent sure that the plot benefited from our finding out how Spears lost his virginity at 15 (the link to his strategic nous is pretty tenuous) but, here we are.

And yep, ‘Nightmare Asylum’ waits until the end before proceeding to head off in a completely different direction from what eventually became canon. I’m not holding that against the book though, being based on the comic book series that was published before ‘Alien 3’ arrived in cinemas.

It’s funny how things work out… I didn’t mind ‘Alien’ but wasn’t that bothered by it, I absolutely love ‘Aliens’, probably my favourite movie in the franchise. And that pretty much sums up my journey with the first two books in this series. Does that mean that ‘The Female War’ (next up) will be the equivalent of ‘Alien 3’ (I like it more than everyone else does)? We’ll see.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

'Conan the Barbarian: Battle of the Black Stone’ – Zub, Scharf, Canola (Titan Comics, Heroic Signatures)

Image
It’s starting to look like this could be the week where I make a half decent dent in my ‘Comics TBR Pile’, lets see how we do... I’ve really been struggling with the ‘Savage Sword of Conan’ collection just recently (more than one reason but I want to finish the collection first before I talk about it) and I thought that I’d have to take a little step back from ‘Conan’ comics and come back when I was in a better mood for it. Until I realized that there was another ‘Conan’ comic lurking in the TBR pile and maybe I could give that a go instead. So that’s what I did. I’ve caught little glimpses of the ‘Black Stone’ storyline, in other ‘Conan’ comics, but I can’t help but feel that the event has kind of passed me by a little. That’s on me though to be fair, I’ve got the attention span of a goldfish right now and there are so many books that I just haven’t been able to focus on; I suspect a couple of them talk about a Black Stone… Oh well, I’m here now. Where better a place to catch up on ‘B...
Read more

‘Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth’ (1992)

Image
Every time Halloween comes round, I promise myself that I’ll watch more horror films and read more horror fiction; we’re halfway through the month and you can see how that’s going so far… There’s still plenty of October left though so lets see how I do from now until the end of the month ;o) First up is ‘Hellraiser 3’ which I watched last night, mostly because I love it (you can tell how this post is going to go, sorry…) but also because it was cheap on Prime and I’m still just on the wrong side of payday. Here goes… TV reporter Joey Summerskill’s life is changed forever when she witnesses the horrific death of a teenager, torn apart by bloody chains. Joey’s search for a story leads her to the Lament Configuration Box but it has already been opened, waking an old evil from its slumber… Now Pinhead walks the earth once more, creating a new army of Cenobites from the transmuted flesh of his victims; his one desire to reclaim the Box. Even with help from an unexpected source, Joey Summers...
Read more

‘Dig Me No Grave’ – Robert E. Howard

Image
  Page Count: Fourteen Pages, eight lines and two words (sorry, it has been one of those weeks) I was looking for something short and sweet, to end the week on, and came across ‘Dig Me No Grave’ courtesy of Paperback Warrior’s write-up . Having read it, I can attest to it being short (all of fourteen and a bit pages in ‘The Dead Remember’ collection) but sweet? Not at all and that is meant in the best possible way :o) ‘Dig Me No Grave’ was originally published in the February 1937 of ‘Weird Tales’ and while it has appeared in other collections since then, I read it in ‘The Dead Remember (The Dark Man Omnibus: Volume 2) and also found it in my copy of ‘The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard. If you’re an e-reading type, you can grab yourself ‘Dig Me No Grave’ over at Project Gutenberg. John Kirowan is woken, in the middle of the night, by his friend John Conrad, bearer of bad news and come to beg a favour. The occultist John Grimlan has just died and Conrad asks that Kirowan att...
Read more