The OctOmen - Not With a Bang, But With Two Paperbacks

I don’t care how weird it sounds to say, this is the entry I was looking forward to all month.

Not because it’s the end of the month – though this has got me itching to get back to working on this site with more regularity – but because I was looking forward to finally checking these books out first hand.

For a long time, these sequels were something I had only known about in passing. In fact, for the better part of several years, there was only one thing I knew for certain about them – when faced with the question of ‘What do we do now that Damien’s dead?’, Gordon McGill’s solution was, and I say this with only the slightest shred of irony, to pull his answer out of someone’s ass.

No. Really. If you’ve heard of these books before this, chances are, it’s largely thanks to the genuinely bizarre origin story they give to their newest antagonist, Damien’s offspring known in the fourth book only as The Abomination before taking on his father’s namesake in the final installment.

For anyone who hasn’t heard this and is wondering what the Hell I’m getting at…well, let’s just rip the band-aid off: as the book sequels present matters, the scene in The Final Conflict between Damien and Kate Reynolds – I’m reluctant to call it a love scene because there is a VERY rapey vibe during it – was carried out through anal sex that then led to Kate giving birth to the Abomination via--I know, I know. Human anatomy doesn’t work that way. At all. It’s part of why these books have been on my ‘Now this I’ve gotta see’ radar.

It's not the sole reason to read this, but it DOES make for a memorable hook to get started on.

As I worked my way through the first three books getting to these, with their own weird elements worked in, I was genuinely starting to look more forward to them than I was the movies. And having completed the five-book cycle – it’s one of the high points of this month’s run.

Let’s be clear – the crazy is there. Quite a few other examples of it too, things like a priest being buried alive by dogs, The Abomination praying to Damien’s embalmed corpse, and the fourth book’s finale, which combines nuclear war with an act of betrayal that’s one part The Passion of the Christ and one-part Weekend at Bernie’s.

Amid all the craziness, the story McGill puts together, to my pleasant surprise, works as a next step for the series, both in terms of sticking to Bernhard’s ‘let the Bible be a road map’ method, as well as just presenting (relatively) logical growth of established plotlines to this point.

It also helps that McGill avoids the mistake The Awakening made – he realizes you can’t just redo the first movie. Instead, we follow the Abomination as a teenager coming into his own with his identity already all sorted out to his followers. We still have outsiders trying to piece things together, but the book also presents much of it in a way that says to the readers ‘yeah, you’ve been on this ride for the past three novels; you already know the score.’

To that end, The Abomination isn’t just a younger Damien – though he shares his father’s looks and abilities, and later his name, it’s established early on that he doesn’t share his father’s goals. Where Damien seeks to rule, using chaos to unite all of humanity under his rule, the Abomination wants destruction, seeking to use his father’s instruments of chaos to plunge humanity into one final, fatal war.

If I’m being perfectly honest, a lot of the positive points I’ve mentioned are more confined to Armageddon 2000, the fourth book in the series. This isn’t to say that the last novel, The Abomination is bad, but it is the weaker of the two. For lack of a better term for it, the problem with The Abomination as a book is, after the ambitious effort to continue the series in Armageddon 2000, The Abomination feels more like a victory lap. It has some memorable pieces to it, including two memorable crucifix-related deaths, but much of the story feels like it’s repeating the beats of the fourth book to diminished returns.

Even the finale, save for an eleventh hour return by a character that lands on the wilder side of these books’ plot points, mostly feels like a more drawn out version of the previous finale, with the betrayal lacking the same interesting rationale behind it that the prior entry offered.

It’s still not a bad read on its own, particularly if you wish to complete the series and see all the plot points wrapped up, but it feels like a step down after the weird, yet entertaining, outing that Armageddon 2000 brings to the table.

It’s a shame these weren’t the stories that got tapped to continue the brand on screen. That first reveal would be a tricky one to pull off – it’s worth noting McGill goes for a book and a half of couching the origins in vague references before finally just putting out on the table in The Abomination, albeit in tasteful wording – but in the right hands, it could have been presented in a way that still fit the feel of the earlier movies.

Or even if they just leaned in to the oddity and stepped on the gas, it would have at least been more entertaining from a sheer ‘we’re actually going there’ perspective than the lackluster reheat we did get.

But that’s, if you’ll excuse the term considering how I started this, hindsight for you.

If you feel curious about these books, either for the closure, the alternate ending compared to that fourth movie, or just for the odd elements like butt birth and corpse hauling, I’d say they’re worth trying to track down. They’re quick reads, and even if your library doesn’t have them (check them first), they’re easy to find cheap on the second-hand market.

Don't feel too discouraged if your library doesn't have much luck with these. I'm not entirely clear if The Abomination got an American release or not. But, again, you can find the British versions cheap enough. And by cheap enough, I mean shipping will likely cost more than the book itself.

And with that, I can now bring this month to a close. This was an interesting ride. A change from Phantasm last year, but not necessarily a bad one, even with my grievances along the way.

As I said before, I’m finally getting back into a feel for this again. So look here soon, there is more coming. Some horror, some otherwise.

Feels good to be back, and a Happy Halloween to you all.

Till next time.