So, my outline for a new Predator (tm) novel for Dark Horse, who now publishes the books, has been accepted. Great people over there at Dark Horse, a class-act all the way. Probably I'll get my daughter to help me, since she has now written more Aliens and Predator tie-ins than I have.
The book is tentatively entitled Turnabout, and that's pretty much all I can tell you until it's a little further along, except that if you like Stephen Hunter's character Bob Lee "The Nailer" Swagger -- from Hunter's books (not the movie version, Shooter), you might have a fun time with the Predator book ...
Saw Shooter last night with my son, by the way. Okay, but very much a boy picture -- lot of people getting shot, exploding heads, blowed-up helicopters and car chases. Conspiracy out the wazoo, mucho macho action, definitely not a date movie unless your girl carries guns and knives.
The movie is not in the same class with the novel, the original title of which was Point of Impact. Bob Lee Swagger, just a good old boy ex-Marine sniper, gets set up. Then they shot his dog ... and they might as well have just jumped off a tall building once they did that ...
There was one short sequence that is one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time, I was laughing like a pack of hyenas over it.
Bob and the geeky FBI agent who is convinced he didn't really do it, go to see an old cracker gun expert out in the woods. Gun guy is mostly blind, and they are querying him about who could have made the shot that took down the Archbishop of Ethiopia from a mile away. Only three or four people in the world might-coulda, the old cracker allows: one is Bob, two are for sure dead, and one was an evil son-of-a-bitch had a building fall on him and disappeared.
Besides, the old guy allows, whoever did is probably dead, too, that's how those boys work. Hell, those fellows on the grassy knoll in Dallas? They were gone a few hours after Kennedy got it, dead and buried in the desert out past Terlingua.
You know that for a fact? the FBI guy asks, eyebrows raised skeptically.
Sure do. I still got the shovel around here somewhere ...
Best movie-character in recent memory, albeit a minor one. That whole scene is terrific, worth the price of admission all by itself ...
4 comments:
Definitely looking forward to the new Predator book! I have the others you and your daughter wrote. :-)
Thanks, Chuck. I hope it'll be a fun read.
Hello there, Mr. Perry-- my name is Philip Neris, big fan of your work on the Aliens vs Predator stories you did and how you created the Yautja mythos.
I look forward to seeing the Yautja again (it will be Yautja, will it?) after having read Shirely's Predator: Forever Midnight-- which caused an uproar with Predator fans by introducing a cousin race of Predators known as the Hish who were hermaphrodite beings, I think that another story by you with the Yautja mythos will be fun to read.
I have read AvP: Prey and it is by far my favorite out of all of the AvP novels.
Look forward to seeing this new book and hopefully, the Yautja mythos will be revived.
Love your works Mr. Perry!
-Philip Neris
Hello from Holland here Mr Perry.
You vision of predator is completely on the mark. Some people understand this character and some do not. You and your daughter obviously do. In my opinion novels like Forever Midnight completely destroy the character of this famous intergalactic hunter. Some will disagree on that and they have the right to disagree ofcourse but the whole Hish idea just doesn,t work. You and your daughter fleshed out this character in such an outstanding way that entire Predator fan-communities are based around the Yautja concept. Unfortunately Midnight Forever sels (although it is largely ignored by the predator fan-community) so these two interpretations of the predator will have to live together. However i hope that these new novels about slave-driving egg-laying Hermaprodites will not bury the intelectually stimulating and very exciting Yautja predator mythos. It would be great and it would rejoice the entire fan-community if we would hear something about the Yautja culture again. So i hope your new book will give us a glimpse of that, or will atleast situate the story in the same universe as the classic AVP novels??
I,m really excited about your new Predator turnabout book. I can,t wait to buy it and read it. Great artwork by the way.
with kind regards,
Niels
(sorry about the spelling-errors i,m european)
Post a Comment