Writing in the Dark: October 2026

I was sixteen when Friday the 13^th came out, and I saw it in a local single-screen movie theater that showed one movie at a time for a week-long engagement. The screen was minuscule compared to today’s IMAX and ScreenX, and I doubt the theater itself could fit more than 100 people (and probably fit fewer). No luxury loungers, either. Just stiff seats with minimal padding upholstered in coarse fabric. And it had the legendary movie theater sticky floor (from spilled soda – at least, that’s what we told ourselves).

It was wonderful.

Slasher films were relatively new in America, especially to mainstream movie audiences. Video cassette rental was a couple of years in the future, and while cable TV existed, my small town didn’t have it. So if a slasher flick didn’t come to a theater near you, you didn’t get to see it. I’d always been a monster kid, fascinated by Horror movies, comics, toys, and – when I got older – novels. But the closest I got to experiencing the grindhouse rawness of slasher films was reading Fangoria magazine, which treated slasher films and the SFX masters who made their gory deaths possible with the highest reverence. But that wasn’t the same as seeing the films. I’d watched Halloween a couple of years earlier, and while it’s arguably the movie that started the slasher genre in America (Italy’s Giallo films had been spilling blood on movie screens since the 1960s, and of course there was Black Christmas), Halloween was as much, if not more, of a suspense film. Friday the 13^th was almost the first true slasher. It certainly had gory kills, along with a twisted version of justice for the killer’s motivation, but it was a murder mystery, too. It wasn’t until Friday the 13^th Part II that we got the true slasher paradigm – an unstoppable killer who wears a mask that makes them appear to be a monster, inventively slaying teens who act immorally. The modern equivalent of kids’ mothers telling them that the boogeyman will get them if they don’t behave. And the unmasking of the killer at the end of a slasher film has echoes of Scooby-Doo as well. “I’d have killed everyone if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”(Scream is the perfect “Scooby-Doo Slasher.”) I’ve written before about how characters like Michael and Jason are reinterpretations of the Grim Reaper archetype (and they’ve got more than a bit of the Frankenstein Monster in them…how they move, the way they kill without speaking, how they keep returning from seeming death...) In the Friday the 13^th films, all of these elements came together in a kind of unholy alchemy to create a new archetype – or at least one that seemed new – which is what gave the archetype its power. Horror fans loved Jason Voorhees, but it wasn’t until Part VI (when he was resurrected like a literal Frankenstein Monster) that he became a worldwide icon and was elevated to the pantheon of legendary monsters.

I saw most of the F13 movies in the theater as they came out and had fun with them all. My favorite experience was seeing Jason X because the woman at the ticket counter refused to sell my brother and me tickets because the movie was, in her words, “so bad.” We finally convinced her to let us in, but she said that if we hated the movie after fifteen minutes, she’d give us free tickets to any other movie showing in the theater.

I also loved Friday the 13^th: The Series, even if it had nothing to do with the films. I always wondered if, in that world, Jason’s hockey mask was one of Lewis Vendredi’s cursed objects. Or maybe his machete…

I read Simon Hawke’s novelizations of the first six films, and I was thrilled when Black Flame started publishing new novels featuring Jason, Jason X, Freddy, and Final Destination. I wrote a Freddy novel titled Protégé, and I was in the process of writing a Final Destination novel titled Nightmare City (my editor was a big fan of zombie movies), but the line folded, and the book was never completed. I’d hoped to write a Jason or Jason X book as well, but that never happened.

But then Perrin Drumm and Jon Dieringer at A24 Publishing asked if I’d be interested in writing the novelization of the forthcoming Crystal Lake TV series. I’d written novelizations of Ti West’s X-Trilogy for A24, and they liked my work well enough to ask me back. I said yes, of course, and once the NDA and contract were signed, I had Zoom meetings with the editors/publishers and series showrunner Brad Caleb Kane. Brad – as he says in the introduction to the book – is a lifelong fan of novelizations, and he was thrilled and excited about the novel. He made sure I had access to the latest scripts and the most recent episodes as they were finished. He was also happy to talk about the story and characters with me and answer whatever questions I had.

I loved the story Brad and the series writers told with Crystal Lake. It was a loving homage to F13 while being its own thing. It added more backstory, deeper characterization, and psychological complexity, while still splashing gallons of blood all over the screen.

But as I wrote the book, I soon realized that this novelization was unlike any of the previous nine I’d done. A basic movie script for a ninety-minute film results in about 40,000 words of prose when fleshed out. Novel publishers want at least 80,000 words, meaning the novelization writer has to invent a lot of material. (Ti West preferred I didn’t add anything to his scripts – which is his right as the creator of the trilogy – which is why those books are short.) But Crystal Lake was eight episodes in length, and each episode was approximately 45 minutes or more long. Instead of novelizing a 90- to 120-minute movie, I had to novelize around six-and-a-half hours of story. That meant the novel would end up being 160,000 words long, and that’s if I didn’t add any material of my own! So I went through all the scripts to determine what I could condense and what I could omit, but when I saw the episodes, I realized how important everything was to the overall story. I couldn’t simply cut events or characters, certainly not as many as I would need to get the book down to a manageable size for A24 to publish (a maximum of 120,000 words).

I wracked my brain trying to figure out how to complete what seemed an impossible task. Then it came to me – I would act as if I was adapting a book for the screen. The Crystal Lake series was the “book,” and my novel would be the “adaptation” of it. Screen adaptations have to condense and cut a lot of material from a novel, and I hoped that mindset would serve me well as I wrote my book. (It did!) I used my long experience as a novelist to find simpler ways to include information from some scenes without completely dramatizing them, and I found ways to add bits and pieces of my own throughout to expand on some important story elements. Brad had some ideas for areas of the story that could be expanded, and my one regret writing the book was that we didn’t have room to include them all. I hope there’s a second season of Crystal Lake so he’ll get to explore those story elements.

The final draft was around 108,000 words.

People ask me if it’s hard writing a novelization and keeping plot details secret until the movie – or in this case, series – is released. Not really. The NDAs I sign mean I could get in legal trouble for sharing any plot details, but even if I didn’t sign an NDA, I wouldn’t want to spoil anything for people. They get to have the one thing I give up by writing a novelization – the ability to see the movie or series for the first time without knowing what’s going to happen. It is, however, a lot of fun to watch people on the internet theorize about what’s going to be in the movie/series. They are often spectacularly wrong.

There were some early mentions of the book online that most people didn’t seem to notice. The book was announced last February in a Publisher’s Weekly article on novelizations. (My friend, author Rena Mason, saw it, though!) And B&N jumped the gun and had the book listed for preorder for a month before A24 found out and asked them to take down the listing.

For various reasons, A24 and Jason Universe didn’t want to announce the novel before the series came out. This was fine with me. That way, I wouldn’t have people emailing me asking me to reveal plot details to them. (It took only twenty minutes after the novel was officially announced before I received the first message asking me to divulge plot secrets.)

Writing tie-ins is fun, and it’s wild to become a small part of the legacy of famous characters like Freddy, Michael, the Xenomorph, Art the Clown, and of course Jason and Pamela Voorhees. I think of novelizations as collaborations with people I never meet, but I got to talk to Brad several times (he’s a lovely person). I didn’t get to talk to the other series writers, but I had their words, and since I got to watch the episodes, I was able to use the actors’ performances and the directors’ visions to inform my writing. Linda Cardellini brought to life an incredibly complex character who I think will become the definitive Pamela Voorhees from now on. Her performance is magnificent.

In a sense, everyone who worked on the series influenced Crystal Lake: The Novel in some way, and I’m grateful to them all. Here’s a link to the series’ IMDB entry so you can check out everyone who helped make Crystal Lake what it is: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23148340/

Jessica Lott edited the book, and it’s much improved thanks to her efforts. I’ve been traditionally publishing fiction and nonfiction for forty years, and she’s one of the best editors I’ve worked with.

And I have to mention Abigail Reno, who narrated the audiobook. She did a fantastic job!

https://www.abigailreno.com/

If you read the book, I hope you find it to be an enjoyable companion to the series, as well as a satisfying reading experience in its own right…and keep your fingers crossed for Season 2!

DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

Here are the current ordering links for The Crystal Lake: The Novel. When more become available, I’ll update the list.

A24

Print: https://shop.a24films.com/products/crystal-lake-the-novel-by-tim-waggoner

Amazon

Audio: https://tinyurl.com/5n7fhcsh

Barnes and Noble

Print: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/crystal-lake-tim-waggoner/1150436578?ean=9781960078490

SCHEDULED APPEARANCES

· Writer’s Digest Horror Writing Virtual Conference, Full Session: Building a Better Monster. Saturday, Oct. 17.

· AuthorCon VII. March 5-7. Williamsburg, Virginia.

· StokerCon. June 10-13. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.