Suffer The Children: A Nightmare On Elm Street Novel

Suffer The Children: A Nightmare On Elm Street Novel by David Bishop

Books based on film franchises always struggle to capture the feel of the movies they are based on - very few that I have ever read have managed it successfully. This one is no exception...

When I started reading it I thought it was gonna be okay, the characters seemed decent enough - likable even. Maybe the fact that this was a book would give the writer more time to flesh out the characters. However, pretty much all the development takes place in each characters introductory paragraph. After that... it's just more of the same.

We are introduced to all our characters in the first couple of pages - and they're all pretty cliche. A punky girl with an attitude, but a heart of gold who has a history of self abuse. A Goth girl, covered in tattoos and rebelling against her God-Fearing Parents. A Black kid who plays basketball and... no wait, that's all he does. A Blonde Prom Queen Wannabe, a stoner ripped right from a Kevin Smith movie and a geek kid who gets beat up if he forgets to do some bully's homework. Nothing original here - but somehow Bishop manages to make these characters likable.

The biggest problem with the franchise now is that we root for Freddy - we want to see him win. Bishop solves this problem by writing Freddy as a totally parody of himself, which to be honest gets pretty boring pretty fast. I would say that 90% of Freddys dialogue in this book includes the word "Bitch". Really, it's the most generic Freddy I've ever seen in any format - I'm not sure if Bishop has actually seen the films or just assumes this is how Freddy talks. Truth is, Freddy utters the word bitch a maximum of once a film (except in FvJ, where he says it like four times).

Freddy's motivation in this book is not his motivation in the films - I understand there's a long running debate amongst fans as to whether Freddy is or is not a child molester. Fact is, most of the films (except Part 4 or 5 - in which one newspapers article mentions it) very explicitly state he is a child killer. Not molester - Wes Craven, in the past, has said "No, he's just a child killer" but at other points he's confirmed the molester thing - so I doubt we'll ever know for sure.

This book has a passge dedicated to Freddy's crispy boner whilst attacking some chick - everything seems very sexual to him. Sure he's used sex as a weapon in the past - but he seems more concerned with getting his toasty leg over. Basically, at no point does the Freddy of the book feel like the Freddy of the films. Never.

Freddy doesn't work - and if Freddy doesn't work, the book doesn't work.

Bishop doesn't seem to know how to structure this thing. It's very 'by the numbers' - introduce characters, bring characters together - they all discover things at the same time, all have Nightmares at exactly the same time - and most of them don't push the plot along. They seem to be there to make up the page count.

You know when you are reading a book and someone says something that totally takes you out of the book, something that no one would ever say in real life? This book is full of that. Packed full - bursting with it. No one in the real world talks about Domains... certainly not teenagers.