Martin Greenberg - Nightmares on Elm Street

[andydecker]

As Dem mentioned Greenberg the other post, I looked what I had in the second or third row on my shelf from the world´s busiest anthologist. Why not listing a few?

St.Martin´s Press 1991

Introduction

Brian Hodge - Asleep at the Wheel
Tom Elliott - Briefcase Full of Blues
Bentley Little Miles to Go Before I Sleep
William Reling Jr. - Le Morte de Freddy
Philip Nutman - Dead Highways, Lost Roads
Wayne Allen Sallee - Close my Eyes and I´ll Kiss You
Nancy Collins - Not Just a Job


I have zero recollection of this. This seems to be all original tales. The Nightmare novelisation stuff never seems to be very good; I still have a couple unread of the last doomed try-out from british Black Flame.

[dem bones]

Ha, any old excuse for yet another rancid revival from vault mk I. Bet you're so glad you started this thread!

Jeffrey Cooper - The Nightmares On Elm Street: Parts 1, 2 and 3 (Futura 1987, 1988, 1990)

Freddy Krueger, terrifying killer who slashed children to death with razor-sharp finger knives was dead - burnt alive by outraged parents from Elm Street.

Ten years had gone by since then, and only now were people sleeping peacefully at night.

But the nightmare was just about to begin ...

Children are having hideous nightmares about a grossly deformed being with razor-edged fingers of death. Freddy is back, now neither man nor beast, but a chilling embodiment of evil itself. And as the nightmares become reality, and Freddy's twisted will becomes the children's command, panic, terror and murder stalk the streets of Springfield again ...

The first three Elm Streets told in a trio of seventy page mini-novels!

I've never bothered with the movies and would not be surprised if this novelisation turns out to be total s**te. Then again, we are Vault and we are not ones to shy away from any book, regardless of how lethally unrewarding the experience is likely to be (unless it has the dread credit 'Anne Rice' on the cover).

******

1. A Nightmare On Elm Street

A very literal adaptation if I'm any judge and it maybe suffers from the need to compress everything into so short a space. The gory murders - surely the selling point of the movie(s)? - are skimmed over and the more complex of them don't really work in print, or at least, not in this novelisation. An eight-page photo inlay may or may not reveal some clue as to the target audience. For what it's worth:

Elm Street is a quiet, clean suburban paradise in affluent, "virtually crime free" Springwood .... until four rich teenagers arrange a sleepover at Tina Gray's place. During the night, promiscuous Tina is slashed to ribbons and dragged across the ceiling by an invisible fiend. Boyfriend Rod Lane - who witnessed the entire episode - is a local tough who wears a leather jacket, so he is arrested for murder. Nancy Thompson, daughter of the local police lieutenant, believes Rod when he swears his innocence. She, Tina and Rod had earlier confided that they'd shared the same nightmare of being attacked by a plastic surgery disaster in a dirty striped jumper with knives for fingers. When she confides in her reformed alcoholic mom, the poor woman hits the bottle again. It is only after Nancy retrieves the killer's battered fedora during one of her nightmares that mom cracks and tells her the story of, how ten years earlier, Freddy Krueger killed over twenty local kids but was never convicted due to a legal technicality so the Elm Street parents got together and burned him alive. And this is his hat - it even has his name sewn inside! Rod 'commits suicide' with his bedsheets and Nancy's near-anonymous boyfriend Glen is sucked into his bed and spewed back out in lumps of flesh, leaving just our heroine to outwit the psycho. Can she lure him out of the land of sleep and back into reality where he can be killed?

2. Freddy's Revenge

Five years after the incidents related in book one, the Walsh family move in at number 323 which has remained vacant since Nancy went crazy. Jesse finds it all a refreshing change from the big city and its violence, and even High School is bearable thanks to Lisa Poletti with whom he's fallen madly in lust. If only it weren't for those hideous nightmares about a melty-faced guy with knife-fingers stealing the school bus ...

Things really take a turn for the worse after Jesse finds first, Nancy's old diary and then Freddy's original razor-tipped glove. The super-sadistic Coach Schneider is pulped by his own gym equipment shortly afterward, and there's a nasty incident involving an exploding parakeet. When Jesse's sometime-buddy Grady is hacked, he realises that the killer is himself, or rather, that he's been demonically possessed by Freddy. Following a night of carnage at the Poletti's poolside barbecue during a Van Halen number, Lisa trails Freddy/ Jesse to the ruined powerhouse where the good people of Springwood burnt the child-killer fifteen years ago. This time we end on a life-affirming triumph for the power of love.

Or do we?

Not that it matters, but I'd say Freddy's Revenge is an improvement on part one, though that's hardly an endorsement as even the Piranha novelisation is looking good to me just now. The chapter where a gleeful Freddy goes berserk at the pool and hurls loads of screaming teens into the boiling water and/ or carves them up is good sick fun and even the ending strikes the right note.

Two down, one to go ......

And that is still the case, can't see it changing any time soon.

[franklinmarsh]

Mwa-ha! Having just trawled all the Friday 13th films (including Freddy vs Jason, and the remake) I have the box set of all Freddy's other 7 efforts to attempt (must say I'm looking forward to New Nightmare). Of the others I've seen the first three. No 1 wasn't bad and seemed to tread new ground. No 2 is hysterical, mainly because of the exploding parakeet and an OTT gay subtext that has to seen to be believed. Number three had a great spooky start but began the degeneration with freddy despatching teens with rubbish James Bond/Edge style quips.