brundleflyforawhiteguy:

FRIDAY THE 13TH MICRO-REVIEW #2:
FRIDAY THE 13TH: CHURCH OF THE DIVINE PSYCHOPATH

Despite the hilarious title, this book is actually kind of awesome. I’ve always wanted to see a story about a church youth group taking the trip up to Camp Crystal Lake, and that’s basically what this is. This is church camp. And that concept on its own kind of brilliantly ties into the sexual themes of the franchise and the perceived puritanical notions that have been definitely embraced by the evangelical Right over time. 

Our heroine is, well, not a god-fearing lass, we’ll say. She’s not much of a believer and is only going along because she just has the biggest fucking boner for the pastor, who turns out to be legitimately insane. Her only real friend is this teenage girl named Meredith who’s definitely a good little Christian girl raised by really strict parents, bound to believe whatever Pastor Evil is trying to sell. 

It turns out that the real reason they’ve come up to the lake is because Pastor Evil has decided that Jason Voorhees is the vessel of God, and that once he is resurrected, it will be a true test of faith. He will weed out the sinners and the virtuous. And the best thing about his character is that he just can not realize that maybe Jason kills everyone, not just the “sinful.” He’ll watch Jason slash through people he’s known for decades and just think “Oh, I didn’t know Susan my organist was fornicating scum unfit to live, you’d never know it to look at her, that’s funny.”

There’s also an Aliens-esque group of commandoes who are slowly realizing that Some Shit is afoot and descend on the lake with all the firepower they’ve got. But the thing is, they’re here to save people who really don’t want to be saved. 

There’s some legitimately interesting shit in this book about the power of belief. There are some people who will follow their pastor to the grave. They believe every word of it. When they’re told God has selected them, they’re willing to lay down their lives and die. And it ties into all the themes you would kind of need a book with this storyline to tie into, like very religious themes of guilt and repression. There’s some genuine-ass LGBT representation in a Friday the 13th novel as uber-Christian innocent little Meredith realizes she doesn’t “look up to” our heroine, she doesn’t “see her as a big sister,” she’s completely in love with her. 

It’s not always the most well-written book, there are definitely places where the language kind of falters a bit, but there’s a lot of stuff in it that’s legitimately great. I love the whole concept, from a religious zealot who projects an agenda onto Jason, to the idea of trying to save people who are totally willing to be brutally murdered because they think it’s what God wants them to do. This is one of the most recommendable Friday the 13th books out there.