Hell On Earth

(Originally posted in my blog on March 28th 2010)

I'm not arrogant enough to believe that anyone reading this has actually been actively following me from blog-space to blog-space, fandom to fandom in my time on the internet (Except for that House of Fail guy, what is up with him?). So I don't expect anyone to know about, let alone remember, my review of DooM – Knee Deep In the Dead back when I was with the Splurd Crew. Long story short: I enjoyed not liking the book. I liked it the way people like Battlefield Earth.
For Christmas, Kippurbird of The Eragon Sporkings got me book two, Hell on Earth and I have to say I actually enjoyed this one.
The characters actually became a little more in depth, particularly Arlene who was a one show more dimentional Mary-Sue Ripley Knock-off in the first book.
We also delve into cults and religion and a whole whack of stuff and to be honest I think one of the strong points in this book was the fact that there were very few monsters and it was mostly character development. It made me feel a little dirty to come to that realization because it's a DooM book, it's all about the one note wanton violence! I’m not supposed to want character development.
Having said that, we do get appearances from more familiar monsters. Revenant and Mancubus show up, as does my beloved Arch-Vile.
We also get two new side-kicks. One is Jill the tom-boy hacker. I like Jill, which probably means she's going to get killed by the end of the series. The other is Albert, a former Marine turned Mormon with the hots for Arlene. Lucky for them Talking is a Free Action and discuss glory holes and marriage while trying to un-couple a train car from a speeding locomotive. Yes, really.
Unfortunately the writer still had an annoying habit of making characters stupid for plot reasons. For example, Fly says they need "tech" to build a ship. Arlene replies with "Tech?". Of course you need tech to build a freaking rocket ship! She could have said "What sort of tech?" or something, but no, Arlene was clueless.
Also continued was the out of place vocabulary. If you've taken the time to read my other review, or This FRIENDS 4 EVER!!!! strip, you know that one of my biggest problems with the book was that the character Fly had a vocabulary bigger than his education should allow for. One word that caught my attention in Knee Deep… was nomenclature. They use that word again in this book no less than twice. Also, I counted at least eight punctuation and spelling errors in the book. Eight. They miss-typed "The" as "eht". Almost every page had at least two exclamation points.
Finally, just like at the end of the last novel, Fly and Arlene are confronted with a huge problem and the last sentence is basically Arlene saying "Fly! I know how to _______ us to _______!"
At any rate I found it much more enjoyable for what it was then the first book and really want to finish the series but I can't find the other two books anywhere but online. My life is hard. show less

Another great book based on the computer game