Knee-Deep In The Dead

Twelve-year-olds in 1995 would like this book, but probably no one else. It read like a play-by-play narrative of someone working their way through the game and trying to make a story out of it via pretty amateurish writing. It did have lots of guts and explosions and alien monsters, though, and it was short.

A rollercoaster tale of alien invasion using a gate from elsewhere that opens on a Martian moon. Based on a popular video game, it properly fills its pages with shoot-em-up as a Marine charges into the alien nest in search of survivors. A blurb compared it to Starship Troopers. I wouldn't go that far, but it does have a plot and it will hold your attention.

2.5 Stars

This was definitely written for fans of Doom. It was fun in parts, tedious in others, and I rolled my eyes quite often. The inclusion of Doomguy's background with religion was an odd choice that I felt was really out of place. Fun read but could've been much, much better.

I found the premise of the book interesting, especially since I played DOOM and DOOM II way back then. However, in some ways the book is too close to the game. The explore-room-fight-monster routine gets repetitive (even the protagonist comments on that!), and ultimately the book does not add much to the already-thin DOOM plot.

Still, I'll probably give the next book in the series a chance to do better.

I have a strange spot in my heart for this book. It's not well-written by any stretch, but I guess maybe I just have fond memories of it. This is probably the best book it is possible to write based on the original Doom.

Oh My Word! This just about has to be the worst book, grammar, plot, characterization, that I have ever read! It was basically reading the game with some token things thrown in, like conversation, love interest, duty, despair and hope. It was just plain horrible. Continuity was almost nil; to call the characters cardboard cutouts would insulting to cardboard.

The game is awesome, this novel, not so much. I can see why someone would read this first one, because they are into Doom, but after getting through this trainwreck, I don't see how the next 3 books were ever published. I certainly won't be reading them!

The shortest way I can summarize this book is this: It's like someone wrote down gameplay and packed it full of erotic jokes.

I bought this one as a test to see what video game based literature was like. I shouldn't have chosen this one to begin with. There are good books that are based on video games, but this is not one of them.