GENRE: Fiction/Horror
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: D
FROM PUBLISHER: It's Halloween night in Haddonfield, Illinois. Six gunshots pierce the silence of this normally quiet town. Neighborhood kids trick-or-treating on the street stare as a man plunges off a balcony. A doctor form the county mental hospital rushes from the house. He has followed his patient, who escaped from the institution, back to Haddonfield, where fifteen years earlier he brutally murdered his own sister. The demented young man has already killed three teenagers this evening. Tonight's massacre has only begun!
MY THOUGHTS: I've never liked the Halloween II film so I didn't expect to like the novel, and I didn't though it's a little better than the film. It's not interesting because all it is Michael killing people in a hospital and there are too many characters to keep up with. In the book Loomis said twice, pages 30 and 39, that Michael killed two people in 1963 but he only killed his sister, Judith. I have no idea why he'd say that. I don't know why that would have been in the manuscript so I'm assuming the author made that up.
It's not stated anywhere in the book that this is based directly on the screenplay, like the book Halloween by Curtis Richards was, so it's unclear if Jack Martin read the screenplay or if he's basing this directly off the film, with a little extra thrown in.
Book vs. Film- Opening credits are very cool when the pumpkin opens up, revealing a skull. Not in the film is hearing Loomis, while still outside at the end of the film Halloween, waiting to kill Michael and not knowing yet of the murders of Annie and Lynda, talk to himself, "I should have torn your heart out with my bare hands and stuffed it down your fucking throat. I should have carved out your eyes like one of your miserable pumpkins and fed them to your rotten face, read you your future from your stinking entrails." That violence doesn't sound like Loomis at all.
Mrs. Elrod's female neighbor, who's on the phone with a friend is named Sally in the book and Alice in the film. In the book there's a death involving news reporter Debra, who's television station is there on the scene where the chaos is that's not in the film at all. Her car has a flat tire, a man stops to help, he makes her uncomfortable so she asks him to leave, she opens the trunk to get tools and Michael's there. He slits her throat. That scene is right before Mr. Garrett, the security guard's, death scene. There's a scene right after that in the film where kids are trashing the old Meyer's house. That's not in the book, I don't think. When Budd and Karen are in the tub in the therapy room at the hospital, the book says Michael turns the water's temperature up to 127 degrees F. The book is more graphic in describing what Karen looks like after being in the scalding water, "...the skin of her face and breasts boiled and peeling loose in long, dangling strips."
In the book when Laurie's roaming around the hospital, right after Michael thought she was in her bed and started stabbing her, we hear her internal monologue. I don't know how she knows that Michael's her biological brother but she was thinking about how, as a toddler right before their parents died in a car accident, she'd ask about him and they'd beat her for it.
The book's epilogue said that the murder count was ten so I guess he's talking about everyone except Annie, Lynda and her boyfriend. So that's Sally, Mrs. Elrod, head nurse Mrs. Alvers, nurses Jill, Karen, Janet, paramedic Budd, security officer Mr. Garrett, Dr. Mixter, and Deputy Hunt. Jimmy wasn't murdered but died later in the car with Laurie from head trauma from hitting his head when he slipped in Mrs. Alvers blood. The reporter Debra was murdered elsewhere.
I don't like how in both book and film when Laurie was in the elevator towards the end, Michael, instead of stopping the elevator door from closing with his hand since he was right at it, he just stuck the knife's blade in it to prevent it from closing, then pulled it out and let it close, allowing Laurie to escape him. I also don't like that we're to believe Ben Tramer, the boy Laurie has the hots for in the first film, was the Michael lookalike who died in the car accident. Two teen boys go up to a sheriff in the movie and book and tell them that Ben left for home an hour before and hasn't made it home yet. Nothing strange about that and no one's going to be telling the police that someone hasn't been seen in only an hour anyway unless it's a small child. We know there's no way Ben could have had an outfit exactly like Michael's so that bit was downright stupid.
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