Connect with us

Books

Vincenzo Natali’s ‘Splice’ Getting a “Perverse” Official Novelization This Summer

Published

on

Horror Queers Splice

Fans of the 2009 sci-fi/horror movie Splice from director Vincenzo Natali will be happy to hear than an official novelization is on the way, with Fangoria first reporting the news this week.

Based on the screenplay by Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant, and Doug Taylor, Splice: The Novelization is written by Claire Donner and published by Encyclopocalypse Publications.

Encyclopocalypse previews, “Experience Vincenzo Natali’s Splice like never before in this new official novelization by Claire Donner!”

Vincenzo Natali tweets in praise of the upcoming book this week, “Claire Donner has written a deeply psychological and perverse novelization of Splice. I loved it.”

Donner tells Fangoria, “I did not add anything new to the course of events in Splice, but the film provides so much room to explore psychology and memory that I’d like to think the novelization will feel fresh and provocative for fans. Vincenzo flatters his audience by never saying too much, allowing for some amount of collaboration between the viewer’s imagination and the nuanced performances of the cast. My challenge was to engage with the story’s tantalizing mysteries without totally violating them; in a lot of ways, Splice is about privacy and the emotional boundaries that its characters cannot or will not cross. Some of what I have fleshed out was derived from unfilmed scenes in a preliminary version of the script, but this was really in the service of creating convincing inner worlds for the characters.”

“Geneticists Clive Nicoli and Elsa Kast are on the verge of a revolutionary breakthrough when they are forced underground by a closed-minded world, fearful of tampering in God’s domain. There in the shadows they create Dren, a hybrid born of beast and man whose potential exceeds their wildest dreams…but Dren becomes their worst nightmare when she grows too strong to contain, too smart to control, and too seductive to resist.

“From the subversive imagination of Vincenzo Natali, Splice is a story about human nature: the universal qualities that bind us, and the aberrations that set us apart. This Frankensteinian fable of freak science and found family explores the pain of difference, while revealing our surprising kinship with the uncanny.”

The novelization is up for pre-order now, and it’ll be available on August 20, 2024.

Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, and Delphine Chanéac starred in the 2009 movie.

Writer in the horror community since 2008. Editor in Chief of Bloody Disgusting. Owns Eli Roth's prop corpse from Piranha 3D. Has four awesome cats. Still plays with toys.

Books

‘INVADER’ – Upcoming Novel Documents an Alien Invasion from the Alien’s Point-of-View

Published

on

From the creators of the cosmic horror movie Daniel Isn’t Real, Brian DeLeeuw and Adam Egypt Mortimer, comes INVADER, an upcoming sci-fi novel with a very unique twist.

Described as “a horrifying and thought-provoking vision of what it feels like to invade the Earth,” INVADER is a deluxe, full-color, illustrated novel about an alien invasion — told from the alien’s point of view! “In a style that’s one part Stephen King, one part David Cronenberg, and one part shattering family drama, INVADER‘s gripping text is magnified by twenty full-color illustrations by acclaimed comic book artist Jock (Wytches, The Losers, Batman: The Black Mirror).”

The team explains, “DeLeeuw and Mortimer worked together for several years developing the story of an alien invasion using this unique point of view.”

“I love Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” said Mortimer. “All the versions. But what’s always interested me, and what I think has focused most of the work that I’ve done, and that Brian has done, is to think about what it feels like to be the monster — or so-called monster — in the story. The idea of a species of creatures so abjectly alien to our planet, coming here and colonizing not out of maliciousness but because of the need to survive — that idea inspired us and we worked for quite a while to figure out the most interesting way to express that complicated and deeply emotional point of view in a way that could be both empathetic and insanely scary.”

Here’s the full official synopsis…

A meteor carrying liquid-crystal alien organisms crashes into the California desert. Desperate to survive these harsh conditions, the aliens soon begin husking and copying bodies — a cat, a coyote, an old man dying of cancer, a young woman deep into a mushroom trip, and Paige, an officer with the Bureau of Land Management.

The aliens are part of an ancient hive mind — the SisterMind — drifting through space from planet to planet, where they replicate, reproduce, and colonize, gutting each planet of its resources before leaving to do it all over again. This is their plan for our Earth as well…

But when alien Paige finds herself with a human mind and emotions and family in all of their complexities, she resists the plan — leading to a war between different SisterMind factions led by a sinister corporate CEO and a young, psychedelic cult leader in the desert.

A brain-melting mix of body-horror, philosophical sci-fi, and high-octane thriller, INVADER asks — is the terrifying miracle of human consciousness enough to stop an alien invasion?

The book will be available in this oversized format exclusively for pre-order on Kickstarter for 30 days from July 16th to August 14th, along with an ultra-limited edition poster by Jock. Book design is by Jason Jones, formerly of Mondo, creating an exquisite piece of narrative art. Published in collaboration with NeoText.

“Part Starman, part Body Snatchers, part Under the Skin, this is sci-fi horror with gasoline in its veins, a bloody but moving study of humanhood by the aliens that might replace us. Smart, fast, funny, tragic, and a hundred other things too,” raves Daniel Kraus, New York Times bestselling author of Whalefall and The Shape of Water.

“The story is cinematic, scary, sagacious. It’s incredible to me that the best book I’ve read on being human has come in the form of an alien invasion,” says Josh Malerman, New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box and Daphne.

Continue Reading