Shaun Hutson - X the Unknown

[kooshmeister]

Now this was a surprise. A movie getting a novelization this long after its release. And by Shaun Hutson, no less! My copy is a used former library edition with library binding. It's a more or less the basic story of the film, but with a few changes. Hutson made the strange decision to update the setting to the modern era, change several characters' names for no reason (I guess he really hated "'Spider'" Webb" because that isn't the name of one of the soldiers anymore), and he also de-aged Adam Royston significantly. His reasons for doing all of this are given in his introduction to the book, but seem weak, especially the decision to make Royston a young man. Sorry, Shaun, but I still picture middle-aged (but still quietly badass) Dean Jagger in my head when I read the book.

Regardless, Hutson does an amazing job of properly conveying the horror of the primordial ooze blob monster that eats radioactive materials... even adding an extra element to the thing's appetite that I don't remember being in the movie: it also eats cancer. The little boy who dies after getting too close to him mysteriously has all the cancer vanish from his body in the morgue, and rather than an orderly and a nurse sneaking off for some on-the-job nookie and encountering the creature when it breaks in to get at some isotopes used by the hospital, it's a woman who has cancer and is seeing her oncologist, and the doctor dies just like the orderly does in the movie, and, like the nurse, the patient survives but loses her mind... but with the added benefit of having all her cancer gone (not that she's in any condition to enjoy her newfound lease on life). If this particular element was in the film, I've forgotten it, but it seems like it's Hutson's idea and I commend him for it. It reminds me of that one X-Files episode about the paramedic who is a cancer-eating serial killer, but unlike that guy, the monster here doesn't even need to touch the people it takes the cancer from. A pretty neat idea, Mr. Hutson!

All in all, a decent novelization of a classic Hammer film and well worth a look.