ALIEN NOVELS
TERROR TALES
READ AN ALIEN NOVEL AND ONLY YOU CAN HEAR YOURSELF SCREAM!
WORDS: STEPHEN JEWELL
WHILE IT CAN BE difficult to recreate the intense terror of Alien in prose form, without the benefit of visuals, authors have different techniques.
Alien: Uncivil War’s Brendan Deneen, Aliens: Bishop’s TR Napper, and Philippa Ballantine – who co-wrote Alien: Inferno’s Fall and the upcoming Alien: Seventh Circle with Clara Čarija – can go where movies cannot by really getting inside the heads of their petrified protagonists.
“It’s hard to be scary in a novel,” says Deneen. “So I really focused more on the relationships of the characters and the gore, which was fun to write because one of the things about Alien and Aliens is the body horror of it, as you’ve got the chestburster and the cocoons. There are some challenges when writing these creatures, and the biggest one is that you can’t really capture the scariness of the alien itself, which was Ridley Scott really using all of his craft as a filmmaker. Aliens has got a couple of scary moments but it’s not really about the scares. My book is definitely a melding of those first two films and is somewhere between them in terms of scope.”