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Ah, the humble novelization. I’m not sure there’s a more pure rush of nostalgia than picking up a well-worn mass market paperback (more on that later, sadly) with the movie poster cover (sorry, I think they’re great!) 

I feel like I was more likely to have novelizations than I was to read them, because as a kid I didn’t actually read much beyond Calvin & Hobbes and comic books. But my family was more than happy to buy these tokens of my fandoms/obsessions as a kid…BATMAN, GREMLINS 2, DICK TRACY…some of these novelizations I’ve managed to hold on to, and some I’ve repurchased as an adult for the dopamine hit. 

The only novelizations I’ve actually read in the last 15+ years of my life have been for Star Wars movies, and they run the gamut of quality. Some are kind of meh, some are mostly enjoyable, and exactly two are among some of the very best Star Wars books of all time (ROGUE ONE and REVENGE OF THE SITH). 

But there’s a newish mini-trend happening in horror publishing with novelizations. Some older horror movies are getting a second life as new novelizations! And author Christian Francis seems to be right in the thick of it all. He’s written a whole bunch of novelizations, everything from MANIAC COP to SESSION 9. There’s a really cool article over on Fangoria that dives into his love for novelizations & his creation of his own imprint, Echo On Publishing. Really fun stuff!!

Francis’s THE DESCENT is actually published by Titan Books, as they’ve been publishing more & more horror movie novelizations as well (as I write this, I’ve got SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT from Titan lined up as one of my next reads!).

I was blown away by “The Descent” when it came out in 2005…I feel like there was a lot of really intense/gnarly horror coming out around that time (“Dawn of the Dead,” “The Mist,” “The Hills Have Eyes,” “Slither,” “28 Days Later”….just a lot of personal favs released from 2000-2007 or so)

I did something with “The Descent” that I don’t think I’ve ever had the opportunity to do: I hit play on a rewatch (my first in probably 15 years) immediately after reading the last page of the novelization. So that was kind of a fun experience! The movie really holds up, and I think Francis’s book adds in quite a lot while never getting overly bogged down with details that weren’t in the movie.

Oh! I had known for years that there were two different endings to the film, one for US audiences and one for UK audiences. And I knew the UK ending was supposedly bleaker, but I have never seen it. But the book is for sure based off that version of the screenplay, so now I can say, wow. Yes. It’s pretty fucking bleak. 

But back to the beginning, and the actual book! 

One year after a terrible tragedy that rocked their friend group, six women go on a caving expedition in the Appalachians. Juno is the organizer of this event (and all the group’s more adventurous get-togethers), and she assures everyone it’ll be a fun, easy time. That the cave is little more than a “tourist trap,” and they’ll all be back at their cabin drinking & relaxing by the evening. 

It becomes clear straight away that none of that is true. That this cave is quite a bit more advanced than most of the women’s caving experience, and this leads to a lot of conflict in the group. But the cave is beautiful & alluring, and so they decide to forge ahead.

Beth, ostensibly the main character of the story, is dealing with an enormous amount of grief. She’s trying to put on a brave face, as much for her friends’ benefit as for her own. But she is dealing with extreme trauma and PTSD and begins to see things in the cave. Things that shouldn’t be there. 

Shapes.

Humanoid shapes.

One thing this book captures in alarming detail is the oppressive darkness of the cave. There’s a scene in the book that’s not in the movie (maybe for obvious reasons) where, on Juno’s insistence, all the women turn off their headlamps and just…stand there. In the dark. 

I’ve been on three different “caving” adventures, and I assure you they were all (mostly) of the tourist-trap/handrail/installed lights variety. No ropes needed. And on all three, the tour guides would do this. Gather everyone in the group safely, have everyone stand still, and turn off the lights. And it’s awful. You realize you’ve never seen true darkness until you are in that cave. That there’s always some element of light pollution in our world, no matter how dark it seems. In the cave with the light out, you 100% can not see your hand directly in front of your face and it is dizzying to say the very least. So kudos to Francis for really selling that here, because I think we’d all be afraid of the kind of dark that he describes in the book.

My one gripe with this book isn’t with the story at all. It’s with the actual, physical book. And it’s not even a gripe with Titan, but more just…*gestures broadly at late-stage capitalism* 

Novelizations should be mass market paperbacks. And not those fucking tall ones, either. Those are the worst. No, real mass market paperbacks. The kind that fit in your back pocket. With that grainy texture to the pages. Maybe some raised lettering on the cover. A stepback, if you’re lucky. Oof, I miss them so much. And as I understand it, they are in no danger of making a comeback. I’ve read that they are prohibitively expensive to produce, and that’s why so few books are made in the format these days. It’s a goddamn shame, is what it is. 

Either way, I’m extremely here for the resurgence of the horror novelization! I think Christian Francis shows a deep understanding of the medium & a real love for the source material here, and I loved getting to experience THE DESCENT this way! Big thanks to Titan Books for sending this one along!