OK, so as I mentioned, it's spooky season, so digging through the library for scary stuff to read. Found The Nightmares on Elm Street as written by Jeffrey Cooper in a box of books I found in mom's attic, which made me mildly bittersweet happy.
Yes, such a thing does exist.
So, a few quick notes on this. I read this before seeing any of the movies novelized in here. (Mom for a long time wasn't happy about me watching R rated horror movie, eventually relaxing to let me see them on video, even if she complained about women screaming in the dining room [where the VCR was]. I tried explaining the Final Girl trope as Female Empowerment, which didn't go over well. Eventually, she quit caring, and the local theater didn't card most of the time, which meant the first NoES I watched was Part 4. Anyway, in a desire to be cool, I bought this collection, thinking reading them would let me pass as having seen them. We'll explain how wrong I was here in a bit. The one thing I love about finding this now, several decades on, is that there's still a faint aroma of the pipe tobacco scent every book I bought at Main News in my hometown ended up carrying. Well, that and you can still feel the embossment of Freddy's glove on the cover.
So, anyway, it's three novelizations of three different installments, with a short story at the end explaining Freddy's birth and death, plus stills from the first two movies.
So, Part one, the original, follows Nancy Thompson as she has nightmares about a dirty man in a red and green sweater and a fedora who lives in a boiler room. She finds out her friends are dreaming about him as well. Which leads to her friend Tina asking Nancy and Glen to spend the night at her house, with Tina's boyfriend Rob joining them. Well, Tina runs into the man in her dreams, and winds up dying in her bedroom. Rob takes the blame, and Nancy arrives in a dream to see him get killed in his prison cell. When she arrive awake, it looks like Rob hung himself in his cell. Exposition later, we find out that Nancy can pull things out of her Nightmares, and the man is/was Freddy Krueger, who her parents turned into a pig roast after he got released on a technicality after murdering a bunch of children. Nancy's mom puts bars on all the windows, her father (Sheriff of Springwood and divorced from Mom) tells her to stay at home and be safe. She asks her boyfriend Glen to stay awake and wake her up as she tries to drag Freddy out of the dream. Glen fails, and becomes a victim of a mattress volcano. Nancy winds up doing what she wanted to do without glen and uses her alarm clock to drag Freddy into objective reality, using booby traps to beat the crap out of him, although he does kill Mom on the way to her turning her back on him and robbing him of his power. Well, except the stinger, which is just as dumb in print as it is on film, where Freddy pulls mom through the window of the front door at the end. While this one does a really good job of following the movie, there are bits missing, like exactly how drunk Mom is and how much coffee Nancy is actually drinking, and the one shot from the trailer that made 9 year old me want to go see the movie, where Nancy gets sucked into goo on the stairs isn't in here.
Part 2, Freddy's Revenge, picks up five years later as Jesse Walsh moves into Nancy's old house and starts having nightmares. Things get weird fairly quickly, as Jesse makes friends with jock Grady over a mutual hatred of Coach Schneider and gains a sort of girlfriend in Lisa. (There's a hell of a lot of homosexual subtext that doesn't quite show up as much in the novelization. At the time, from what I remember, it was thought to be homophobic, but particularly with a bunch of revelations as time went on from the lead actor and the screenwriter, it's actually meant to be homoerotic.) Anyway, seems Freddy is working on possessing Jesse to reenter reality. Which leads to a bunch of silliness involving exploding birds, an S&M scene with the coach, Jesse sleeping undressed with Grady, and being unable to perform with Lisa. (You can watch clips on YouTube if you're curious.) Anyway, Jesse defeats Freddy with the power of teenage virgin hormones, except the stinger where Freddy's glove comes out of Lisa's chest. Again, novel follows the movie fairly closely, although it tends to gloss over the stuff that makes the movie more interesting in the modern age.
Part 3, Dream Warriors, which is where my ruse of having seen the movies fell apart. See, the novelization is based off Wes Craven's original script, while the filmed script got revised quite a bit, meaning there are quite a few derivations in the novel vs the movie. The biggest ones being that Joey and Kinkade die in the book, while they survive 15 minutes into Part 4 in the films. The deaths and powers are also a bit different, like the Wizard in the film is here a D&D nut without a wheelchair, the drug addict shoots fire, Joey talks (and doesn't get taken hostage by a cross dressing Freddy when g=he gets trapped), and Nancy isn't a professional. There's no mention of Amanda Kruger, although it's revealed Nancy's house in the original was where Amanda got raped by 1000 maniacs. Oh, and our sleepwalker gets thrown in front of a speeding ambulance rather than off a building, and Freddy quotes Johnny Carson when TV girl dies. The one thing the book does a bit better than the movie is explore how it stops mattering so much whether anyone is in the dream or not, by the end reality and dreaming have become one entity.
Honestly, the biggest issue with these novelizations is that the film series highly relies on visual images, and the author really can't shape the words in ways that let you see them the way film can. (Although with the dawn of DVD, Blu-Ray, and 4k, they look pretty threadbare with the cleaned up visuals.) On the other hand, the author does give us occasional peeks into the minds of the protagonists, something the movies couldn't really do. While you're probably better off renting/streaming the movies, the novels are a fun way to spend some time, and even catch a glimpse of what might have been.
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