The Predator: The Official Movie Novelization

Predator Novels

by Christopher Golden, Mark Morris

The official novelization of the summer blockbuster The Predator, Shane Black’s new movie with a screenplay by Shane Black and Fred Dekker.
For centuries Earth has been visited by warlike creatures that stalk mankind’s finest warriors. Their goals unknown, these deadly hunters kill their prey and depart as invisibly as they arrived, leaving no trace other than a trail of bodies.
When a young boy accidentally triggers the universe’s most lethal Hunters’ return to earth, only a ragtag crew of ex-soldiers and a disgruntled science teacher can prevent the end of the human race.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Horror, Audiobook, Thriller, Military Fiction, Aliens

318 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 18, 2018

About the author

CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN is the New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of such novels as Road of Bones, Ararat, Snowblind, Of Saints and Shadows, and Red Hands. With Mike Mignola, he is the co-creator of the Outerverse comic book universe, including such series as Baltimore, Joe Golem: Occult Detective, and Lady Baltimore. As an editor, he has worked on the short story anthologies Seize the Night, Dark Cities, and The New Dead, among others, and he has also written and co-written comic books, video games, screenplays, and a network television pilot. Golden co-hosts the podcast Defenders Dialogue with horror author Brian Keene. In 2015 he founded the popular Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival. He was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His work has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award, the Eisner Award, and multiple Shirley Jackson Awards. For the Bram Stoker Awards, Golden has been nominated ten times in eight different categories. His original novels have been published in more than fifteen languages in countries around the world. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com

Reviews

[Stephen Robert Collins · Rating 1 out of 5]

First of all The worst book of 2018 & this also by Mark Morris. This another old classic movie that has been remade which did not need to be. I seen lot 'new' horror movies that the first time are great but The 2nd time are a stinker. This later all it is showing off special effects & how we have progressed since the last one.
If done another one perhaps set on the home world or in space station this would been great. But No lets insult Arni this not Predator the alien is the same but by putting the word The in front it does NOT change it enough.
The book is ok story no idea how close to movie it is .But I have read movie books before & often like Search for Spock or Last Action Hero it can have lot more pages in it.
Huge amount missing bits edited from the movie.
Here we see The Predator straight away no long wait, no building up to the crunch no surprise just bang walp here is the UFO & ugly spoiling the whole fucking thing!
The whole point is to keep you guessing but Must thought that everyone knows now but Whole point that this for 17-18 that don't.
This got plenty of action but Its amend at teenage boys its so,so,so, done before. The plot is ghastly an alien crashes losses his armour & goes look for it. Wow that's so New!
This could win load of crap award but It may improve?
If want very light read you like it but If like me you find it so American Teen movie & about as scary as rice pudding skin
It didn't.
WINNER OF BULLSHIT AWARD 2018 Well some one has to win it.Ha Ha.
To completely rune this book my father died on 13/10/18

[Sarah-Grace (Azrael865) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A US army sniper, McKenna, is on a mission in the jungle when a Predator ship crashes near him. After taking his shot, he decides to grab a few interesting looking objects from the crash site and mail them to his PO Box back home. He knows that what he has witnessed will be hushed up and he wants a little insurance.
Sure enough, the army decides to give him a psych-eval, and he ends up on a bus with other unstable ex-military men. Soon these men become McKenna's new squad...and friends. They end up on their own mission. Save McKenna's 12 year old son from the Predator.

The reason I may watch this movie is one element in the story I really want to see the visual for. This Predator has his own hunting dog-like creature. A Predator dog, with mandibles, that chases down targets the Predator indicates. During the groups fight for survival, one of them shoots the Predator dog in the head, supposedly killing it. Except, later the Predator dog is back running towards them. Out of desperation one of them throws a stick at it....and the darn thing decides it wants to play fetch. 😂 The shot, while not killing it, lobotomized it, creating a very bizarre playful pet.

[Elwin Kline · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Really liked it!"

Perusing other reviews prior to posting mine, I am quite surprised how much hate this book received. I guess people had unreasonably high expectations for a book about alien hunter(s) who turn invisible, throw space boomerangs, and have swords eject from their wrists.

Also... for everyone complaining about how this book is too much like the movie... um, it literally is on the front cover of the book "THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATION". If you wanted something outside of the scope of the movie... I just did a quick Google search and found seven (7) predator books that have not been made into movies. How bubbleheaded can you be to complain about a book based off of a movie, I say again, when it is literally the first line of text on the front cover?

I personally loved it, I love the predator (and aliens) universe immensely, and this was super fun, full of action, and much needed sci-fi for me as I had taken a small break from the genre prior to this.

To any sci-fi fan and especially predator fan, I would absolutely recommend this enjoyable and light read to scratch your killer alien itch.

[Dawie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once you decide to not take this book to seriously, it turns out oke.

[Silviah Colombara · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I had not seen the movie before reading the book I am sure I would have enjoyed it a lot more.
The novel is almost annoyingly a replica of exactly every scene of the movie. And as a reader, this took most of the fun out of it.

Compared to the prequel I read just before this book - The predator, Hunters and Hunted - this one did not really offered the point of view of the alien. Which is a real pity, because I do not know about you, but I always take the alien's side, and I would have liked to know how he percieved us, especially what the Upgrade was thinking.

I really liked the idea of the book - the research for a new, more evolved type of alien. An the idea that Rory was the human equivalent to the alien evolution.

Overall, not a book that I will remember my entire life, and definetely one that will teach me to think twice before reading a book after watching the movie.

Hope you will have a better experience with it.

A couple of quotes that are worth mentioning:

" Casey found the alien both impressively beautiful and utterly terrifying."

"The Predators were a spacefaring race, interstellar travelers, which mean that despite their obviously violent, apparently savage culture, they were also a people with advanced science and technology far greater than humanity had managed to create."

"..this bastard was bigger and more terrifying than anything he could have ever imagined. And it was built like a Roman gladiator on steroids, its muscles huge and powerful, its massive hands tipped with claws that looked as though they could tear a man's head off with one swipe.."

"He only opened his eyes once they were inside the Upgrade's ship - because how could he not? Terrified as he was, this was an alien spacecraft, and therefore it was automatically awesome."

Enjoy your reading!!

:)

[Frank Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Again, consider that I'm just here to get my completionist badge for the 'Alien'/'Predator' crossover universe and that the Predator stories are a bit of a chore for this particular scifi nut. Not as bad as Torchwood in the Doctor Who franchise but, I should get back to the point.... which is that even I thought this was quite good.

The Predator mythos is growing on me and although it took a while for me to recognise bits from the film, I was finally able to connect some dots back to the prequel book 'Hunter and Hunted' and most importantly I certainly preferred the book version in the end. Especially, in this case, because of the inner dialogue of the young aspie, Rory McKenna.

Funny, at some point in the story the name McKenna seemed to have morphed from what I had previously been hearing as McKinnon. Anyway, that's weird and irrelevant.

You know what else is weird and irrelevant? I thought there was only about a rough half dozen 'Predator' tie-in books, based only on what I could see on audible. Fortunately? Probably unfortunately for me, but hopefully fortunately for you... there appears to be more like two dozen entries according to the series list here on GR. Well I'm not sure if I will or if I won't or if I'll maybe plan on coming back to it some day. I do really like my badges but I was only banking on about a month all up in this crossed over universe. We shall see.

[Mr Chuck · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dumbing down of a franchise.

So, if you've not seen the film (why would you? it was so bad they've ignored it and made the brilliant PREY instead) this is about a predator coming to earth chasing another predator for some reason, and then the other predator starts hunting humans after because autism is a superpower...honestly that's the baseline of the story.

This had no charm or spirit of the books or films in the Predator universe. From the upgraded predator just walking in like a tank to kill everyone without even hunting (which is the whole point) to how a kid with autism figures out alien tech and language from a couple of minutes of looking at shapes.

The less said about the ending in the film the better.

I gave it 1 star because if it wasn't for this story we wouldn't have had the reboot and PREY so well done, here's your gold star.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75/5

I’m rounding up to a 4 because I liked this better than the movie.

While I didn’t actually like many of the characters, I did like Casey the fmc in this. She’s more intelligent in the book and comes across as someone more neurodivergent. I enjoyed her POVs and there was POVs of “Fugitive” the Predator and the upgraded Predator. I thought the flow of how the story was told was good, kept pacing well.

Was it well written? Better than the movie by leagues. I hated the mid POV jumps in the chapters because if they didn’t say who the character was, I would not have known who the character was.

I’d read this again.

[Lara W · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved it. Awesome job. Funny and morbid.

[Lonnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

An extremely accurate depiction of the updated Predator movie, it's not a bad read. It had plenty of action, moves along in a quick pace, and it's not necessary to know all about the prior Predators that came before it, although it helps to know a little bit of the alien history (from previous movies/stories). So why did I not rate this novel higher? The narrative of the novel is a slow, monotone, and droning voice, the climatic scenes although numerous, just seemed like teenage words thrown together (i.e "he hung there, strung up like a flaming butterfly" and so on). The book also read exactly as if you're watching the movie and you're just reading the script. It doesn't add any backstory really nor do you feel connected to the characters, even Rory, the young, gifted boy who also happens to have Asperger's. It's not a spoiler alert; if you've seen the movie, it's like reading the book but taking the longer route to the exact same point. The movie was just ok hence the novelization of it was just ok, but I would definitely pick another narrator.

[Nick · Rating 1 out of 5]

After the prequel novel I was hoping this would be better, it just seemed a bit more of the same and in some ways a step back rather than truly offering a twist to the franchise or anything new. The idea of the predators upgrading themselves with other species DNA just seems way off anything that has gone before. From my understanding they are a proud ancient race who value the hunt because it honours their past. Now we have them injecting themselves with harvested DNA willy nilly in a bid to evolve themselves but with absolutely no reason for this.

Now we have human hybrids and whatever the 'upgrade' was supposed to be. This was just a lazy villain in my opinion, how can we make the predator scarier....make it bigger! No it's not scarier it's just bigger and adds nothing to the story.

The idea of the soldiers son being the next human evolution was interesting but again never really got taken anywhere it just seemed like a deus ex machina to advance the plot. Hmm scientists around the world haven't managed to decode the technology or language but a boy with Aspergers can do it in a few hours. No just no.

The lady scientist was the token female character but who can now run and jump and shoot with all the boys and don't forget shes smart! See women you are being thrown a bone just a big smelly patronising one. The predator dogs...lets just forget those ever existed ok? It was funny for like 30 seconds in the story and then was just a bad idea.

Other than that there was lots of guns, action and gore with stereotypical government agents and badass ex military types thrown in for good measure. I was never quite sure where it was set as one minute we were in the U.S. the next we were in a jungle.

The ending was left completely open so expect more of this new 'scarier' predator, I'll just hope there's more proper decent old school predator stories like Tim Lebbons Rage war series instead.

[Iain Hawkes · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novelization of the film of the same name - said film which I actually quite liked, even if I seem to be one of the few people on the planet to do so. Be that as it may, the novelization is okay. There's the main hurdle that when you're novelizing an action-heavy film into a visual medium, the end result is going to be lesser by definition, and there's not enough original stuff in the novel as a whole to make up for it. Add to that is the issue that off-screen, the Loonies are less distinct, and tend to blend in as one blob of characters. Not that they were that distinct to begin with (from each other at least), but at least there, there was acting to carry the writing. Here? Not so much.

Still, the above issues aside, I did like the novelization overall. For the most part, it does a good job of carrying the film's humour over. There's also some nice flourishes from the author, in how certain scenes/characters are handled. For instance, quite often, the writing quickly delves into the POV of a no-name character for a few paragraphs/pages, as events play out from their POV, and for a fair bit of the time, ending with their death. These include a fighter pilot (whose fighter is vapourized by the yautja ship) or a merc who's killed terribly by the Upgrade Predator. Even when the no-names aren't in harm's way (e.g. a NORAD operator, a police officer whose car is stolen), the writing is still solid, and oftentimes, quite funny. And the divergences sometimes feature the POV of one of the yautja too, which are also handled well.

On another note, there's stuff from the movie that's missing, such as Traeger explaining why the yautja are coming to Earth more recently, or more notably, the movie's ending, with the "Predator suit" being revealed. I wasn't fond of the idea behind it, but the novel doesn't feel properly concluded without it. It ends, and tries to give a sense of gravitas, but it falls flat.

Still, novel was decent overall.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually better than the movie, IMHO.
One example is the death of Tregear, a major character in the film (almost as much of a destructive force as the Predators themselves). His death in the film is almost "don't blink or you'll miss it" - bad editing, in my view - but the book explains more.
He was about to shoot at the "Upgrade Predator" with the stolen Predator "shoulder cannon" but his pants had caught on fire from the incendiaries that had been used. Casey called out to him to warn him that he was on fire. He turned his head to look at her, the cannon turned too - and according to the book, the adrenaline rush of panic, as he realized he was on fire, caused the cannon to fire and he shot himself in the back of the head! Perhaps not very plausible, but the book explains it a little bit better. Incidentally, the book does not have the film's epilogue with the "Predator Killer".

[Menion · Rating 2 out of 5]

It isn't the fault of the authors that the rating isn't higher, Golden is a good author, was actually quite good. The fault lies with these two being given possibly the stupidest script in cinema history to work with and turn into a book. If not the dumbest, it's at least top five. Shane Black must have been smoking some seriously strong giggle-sticks if he thought this was a good script while he was writing it. This one makes the godawful PREDATOR 2 film look like a work of cinematic genius.

[Ernesto I. Ramirez]

I just began reading it and yes is impossible to take it seriously and can only take it with hilarity, beginning with the fact that is supposed to be set in Monterrey, Mexico... which apparently is a jungle.



If it had been set in Nayarit or in the south of Mexico I would have understood the story happening in a jungle... damn I was sure the film was made close to Puerto Vallarta, so why not set it there.

[Lillie Gryphon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pros-
The occasional chuckle worthy moment.
The first predator encounter.

Cons-
Characters are bland and forgettable.
The new predator here is wasted potential.
The action isn't entertaining.
The comedy is mostly misses.

The predator was totally shafted here. The idea of a predator with human DNA is cool, but it amounts to basically nothing. The strange addition to predator lore here makes no sense in context of previous works, and makes them less interesting. Not worth a read and I don't recommend the movie either.

Entertainment Value- Low

03/10/2021

[Dan DalMonte · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fast-paced, lucidly written and engaging thriller. I am interested in the fact the Predator has human DNA and is trying to exploit this autistic savant youngster to improve on its upgrade status. The Predator appears to be some transhumanist cyborg. The characters of McKenna and his gang are lovable, as is Rory, McKenna's autistic but highly intelligent son who actually grabs hold of some of the Predator's gear. The Predator again appears invincible but even finite and comparatively weak human beings somehow manage to beat it, after several casualties.

[AJRXII · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find it strange that someone is saying this has dumbed down the franchise. When all said and done although it was the 80s and I loved Predator when it came out, isn't that dumb as **** seriously it's as cheesy as curds and whey!!

This on the other hand is well written and has a good storyline. The writer hits the 'autistic' nail on the head so how that's dumbed the franchise down I don't know? It's better than the film of the same name that's definite.

Give it ago and don't bother with the crap review somewhere here.

[Jay · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was the movie to the T. I knew that going in, but for some reason I thought it would be better. As in the movie, the character of Traeger was awful. There seemed to be a bit more humor in this rendition of the story, but overall it was just the same superficial character development and bland plot line as the movie. Still, there is something enjoyable about a Predator going on the hunt.

[Christopher Dodds · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was far better than the film, it had more back story with each of the characters including more of the back story of the two Predators the normal one which was the renegade one and the upgraded one. My favorite character was Mckenna and his son which was far more explained in this book than in the film.
But yeah it was great full of violence and action sequences as well as some well written dark humor which fit in well with some of the more serious parts of the story.

[Zac Stojcevski · Rating 5 out of 5]

So this book is neither Moby Dick nor Treasure Island, but the imagery is top notch and overall a lot of fun if death, destruction and splattering aliens does not offend you. A decent result is achieved in expanding on characters in the plot. It seems apt to have read this during Autism Awareness Month in that there is extraterrestrial tribute to and suggestion that the geek shall indeed inherit the earth. Now to find the time to watch the movie!

[Joshua Welch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the Predator movie series. Reading an adaptation provides some fun additional charms to it that are really enjoyable. The Predator may not be the best movie of the franchise but this novelization was fun and enjoyable all on its own. Well written and overall an easy engaging read. My only complaint is how the author continued to point out the predator hound had gotten a bolt to the brain, we get it.

[Wendy Bocock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Writing was good, and book was better than the movie. I mostly read the book because I like Christopher Golden, and was interested in the scene that got cut from the movie at Olivia Munn's request. I really liked the actors in the movie, but it felt choppy, and there were things that were confusing. Book cleared up some of them, but still felt choppy and like I was missing things.

[Bryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story is exciting and the movie matches it perfectly. The book was better and it just goes to show that bad casting can sure kill a film. Almost none of the actors in the film were right for these characters. The potential in this story is so much greater. I read the prequel before starting this novel and it was in no way a TRUE prequel so I think that was a mismatch as well.

[Vermillion · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book left me with important unanswered questions. I hated how almost all the main characters seemed to be begging for empathy. That is to say this title should have been more macho. And a few of the action sequences didn’t make sense to me because I perceived a lack of attention to minor details.

[Twainy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love B movies, just so you know where I’m coming from before I tell you that I really enjoyed this book!

I love the original movie!

This was a fun story! A predator … a super predator … a military man … a group of men with guns … an autistic son … a predator dog!!

I should t have to say more! Good narration! I want to read another Predator book!!

[Colm Jennings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seen the film? Now read the novel.

Well written, some differences between the film and the book but minor and doesn't spoil the story in any way. Packed with action from start to finish with humour dark scattered throughout. If you like the predator universe and enjoyed the film this is worth reading.

[Jeff Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not the author's fault

The script wasn't interesting enough to be a good novel. I don't want a cheesy novel filled with 80's themes but this wreaks of millennial postering. Not my cup of tea

[John R. Dailey Jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

NEW AND IMPROVED IT IS OR IS NOT....

Hello, this story was a pretty good read. I still think the "Predator" from the original movie would mop the floor with every " Predator " since. Thanks.

[Diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's never easy rating a movie novelization. They usually do a fair job of capturing the essence of the film. I haven't seen the latest Predator movie yet. This book made me want to see it so I guess it did its job.