Predator 2 Novelization: Plot, Lore & Movie Differences
Predator 2 is a 1990 novel by Simon Hawke, published by Jove Books in December 1990, after the 1990 film opened on 21 November. It followed Lieutenant Mike Harrigan through a 1995 (the movie had 1997) Los Angeles heat wave as a cloaked hunter moved from a Colombian loft to a subway car and a slaughterhouse. Hawke stayed closer to the shooting script than Paul Monette had in the 1987 Predator novelization, which had turned the jungle hunter into a shapeshifter with a spear. It was the second Predator novel. Dark Horse's Concrete Jungle comic had already appeared in 1989, and Nathan Archer's Concrete Jungle novel did not come until 1995.
Plot Summary
The hunt sat in Los Angeles on the fifty-ninth day of one-hundred-and-nine-degree weather. News vans treated the heat and the gang war as one story. Lieutenant Mike Harrigan treated both as a street fight he was in. The hunter that had come for the city treated them as game.
The Ship And The Heat
The hunter's ship came in low over the western hemisphere, close to light speed and invisible to Earth radar. NORAD in Colorado Springs did not see it. The Soviet Ablakova complex in Siberia did not see it either, and neither did the satellites. It skimmed the Caribbean, crossed Belize and Guatemala, then turned north over Mexico and the Mojave toward Los Angeles. This hunter had already studied the helmet recordings of the failed hunter from Central America. That hunter's ship had returned to the homeworld on its own after a human killed the pilot, and the battle helmet had dumped the expedition into the ship's banks.
On the ground, Channel newsman Tony Pope jumped from a van into a Colombian shootout and called it the story of his life. Harrigan reached the same block with Detective Danny Archuleta, a childhood friend and his partner of many years, and Detective Leona Cantrell. Sergeant Reeger wanted an assault vehicle. Deputy Chief Heinemann later ordered them to hold the perimeter and wait for a federal team.
The Scorpios Loft
Harrigan ignored Heinemann's order to hold the perimeter, ran a shielded car at the wounded officers in the street, then pushed into the loft held by the Scorpios, the Colombian crew the street called the Scorps. El Scorpio fled to the roof. The hunter was already inside, having come through the skylight under a light-bending cloak.
Its heat sight read the firefight as colored wash, engines and bodies glowing through the helmet. A helicopter overhead matched the airship stored from that earlier hunt, the time a human had beaten one of them. After El Scorpio went off the roof, the hunter locked onto Harrigan as a prize specimen, the one warrior who had attacked while the others hesitated. Danny and uniformed officers interrupted before it could take him. Harrigan wore a Colt .45 on the street. A chrome Desert Eagle sat in the trunk and stayed there.
Ramon Vega
Ramon Vega lived in a Bunker Hill penthouse paid for by the drug trade. He did not know the name of the nineteen-year-old with him when King Willie's Jamaicans, the crew the book calls the Demons, broke in. Gold Tooth hung Vega upside down and put a knife to his chest. Willie wanted Vega's soul in a jar.
The hunter hit the room before they finished. A blade came through one man's chest. A telescoping spear threw another across the floor. Gold Tooth emptied his pistol at empty air, then the hunter dropped the cloak in front of him.
Ray's Tavern
Metro drank at Ray's Tavern, a basement cop bar run by ex-cop Ray Drummond. The banner over the bar marked Leona's twenty-eighth birthday. Her husband Rick Cantrell, who owned a motorcycle dealership, bought her a club soda because the heat had made her sick all week. Jerry Lambert was the new man from Rampart, the one they called the Lone Ranger after he took four armed bank men alone in his first week and drew a mayor's commendation.
Harrigan left Danny at Vega's penthouse with a warning to watch himself, then sat with Captain Pilgrim. Pilgrim was a heavyset man in his fifties who treated the federal team as something Harrigan should stay out of. Harrigan did not believe Peter Keyes was DEA. Pilgrim told him to drop it, and did not expect him to.
Danny
Danny went back into the penthouse alone and found a light metal dart with a razor edge, closer to a throwing star than any round he knew. On a splintered beam his hand closed on something that felt like scaled flesh and was not there to the eye. A clawed grip caught his ankle and held him over the floor. The hunter cancelled the cloak, about seven or eight feet tall, three-fingered, with a helmet and a shoulder gun, and copied Danny's own words back at him.
It yanked him into the rafters and tore out the skull and spine. Then it climbed the clock tower with that trophy, raised a spear, and drew lightning down the rod beside it. The film saves that rooftop cry for Jerry. Here it belongs to Danny. An honor guard later fired three volleys at the cemetery, and Tony Pope filmed the graveside from under a tree until Pilgrim ran him off. The hunter had marked Harrigan as the prize and treated Danny as the first of his warrior unit to fall.
King Willie
Harrigan found King Willie in an alley with thrown bones on a crate. Willie studied the pattern and told him there was no killing what could not be killed. The thing taking their people came from the other side. Harrigan left with that warning and no name for what he was hunting.
Willie later met the hunter with an Uzi and a large knife, not the film's rapier. He emptied the gun at a shape he could barely see, then the hunter copied his words back at him. The skull and the scalped dreadlocks went into the gel case on the ship. Willie was among the dead Harrigan later had to count.
Irene Edwards
Dr. Irene Edwards ran the morgue that Jerry would not go near. The federal team had wiped her files after the penthouse. One fragment survived: a wall sample with ammonia, nitrates, and bovine hemoglobin laced with diethylstilbestrol, the steroid used to put weight on cattle before slaughter. Edwards told Harrigan the killer had been in a slaughterhouse.
The Subway
The hunter followed Leona and Jerry onto the metro on purpose. Killing the rest of Harrigan's warrior bond, it judged, would drive their leader into a fight worth taking. Commuters who drew guns were worker drones to it, poor trophies. It used the plasma cannon in the car, not only the blades.
Jerry died hanging from the overhead straps. Leona ran into the cloaked hunter in the tunnel, and it lifted her by the throat. The helmet read her heart, her lungs, and a soft blue glow in the abdomen. She was gravid, and the ethics of the hunt forbade taking a pregnant female. The hunter treated that as poor game management, dropped her, and went back for the trophies it had taken.
Harrigan reached the station through a press crush around Heinemann, who wanted help after Keyes's team had vanished and left the department holding the killings. Harrigan went past him into the tunnel. He saw the hunter tear a skull and backbone from a body on the next platform. Paramedics later picked up fetal heart tones on Leona and moved her to L.A. County.
Keyes And Dutch
Peter Keyes ran the federal team from a trailer and a Bell Jet Ranger, not the film's TwinStar. In that trailer Harrigan saw a taped interview with the female guerrilla who had walked Dutch to the landing zone ten years earlier. He also saw a separate interview with Vega's girl, taken after Keyes's men had pulled her out of the penthouse. Harrigan understood that Keyes was unlikely to let him walk away with any of it.
Keyes had gone to the hospital himself after the Central American hunt. Major Alan "Dutch" Schaefer had led a Delta-style hostage team that had never lost a man until that job. Only Dutch and the guerrilla came out. Dutch used the word Predator for the thing that had skinned the team and then armed a low-yield nuclear charge that left a crater in the five-to-ten-ton range, with residual readings that made no sense. The guerrilla's account matched Dutch's, and both passed polygraphs. Weeks later, sick from the radiation, Dutch ripped the tubes from his arms, overpowered the orderlies and guards, and stole a car from the lot. Doctors thought he would die of bone cancer or leukemia. Keyes had read the file and was not sure.
The Slaughterhouse
Keyes meant to take the hunter alive. His men charged nitrogen guns, set a net and restraints, and filled the packing house with radioactive dust that clung to the suits as a purple glow. Insulated suits hid their heat, and ultraviolet lamps were meant to pick the hunter out of that mist. Garber sat on the monitors in the trailer while Harrigan watched the team climb a steel stair in the green low-light feed.
The hunter heard padded steps and found no heat signatures, then switched the helmet to ultraviolet and saw six men below it. It circled behind them on the third-floor landing. Harrigan shouted a warning through the intercom, fought two men in the trailer, and went in with a shotgun, an M-203, and a .38 taped to his ankle. The hunter dropped from above with the spear, a dart went through one man's goggles, and a jammed nitrogen blast froze a sprinkler pipe until the floor flooded.
Harrigan blew the sliding door off its track and called the hunter down. Water from the sprinklers shorted the cloak and left blue arcs on the armor. The hunter copied King Willie, and a grenade wrecked the shoulder cannon and tore its back. A wrist gun punched through Harrigan's vest and the plate under it. He ran into a corridor of hanging beef, emptied a riot gun into the hunter's chest at close range, and thought it was dead when it went still in the water.
He pulled the helmet and saw mandibles, an inner mouth, and a child's copied line about candy. The hunter seized his throat, threw him into a wall, and the helmet fell into a funneled blood drain and went down the flue. Without that atmospheric regulator, Earth's air began to poison it. Keyes came back with a nitrogen gun and ordered Harrigan out. The hunter threw a disc that cut Keyes in half, then copied Keyes at Harrigan as Harrigan went up the ladder.
Rooftops And Healing
Harrigan waited on the elevator housing with five rounds in the .38. The hunter came onto the roof with a portable respirator to its face. Harrigan put one round through the armor. The spear stuck in a water tank, he charged with it, and both of them went over the ledge with the hunter's claws locked on his arm. Hanging there, the hunter opened a gauntlet panel and started an arming code. Harrigan tore the disc free of the brick and cut through the arm and the panel, and the countdown froze.
The hunter's knives bit the wall and slowed the fall until it hit a drainpipe and went through a window. In a bathroom it mixed tile, broken glass, and cold cream in a field mortar, poured a blue liquid that set the mass, and slapped the hot mix on the stump and the wounds in its chest. A syringe went into its chest, and the respirator bought it a little more air. A new hand could be grown and grafted once it reached the homeworld, but not before Harrigan's skull sat in the case. Harrigan crossed the drainpipe, followed green blood down the elevator cables, and fell through a hole blown in the shaft floor onto metal that was not a sewer.
Final Showdown
The passage under the shaft curved like a shell, and a methane fog sat waist-high. A net slammed Harrigan into the wall. He cut free with the disc, then the hunter drove him back with the twin blades and copied Harrigan's own warning to Danny. Harrigan drove the disc up through the midsection. Bright green blood came out, and the hunter went to its knees. Harrigan raised the disc to finish it, then a trill came from the mist behind him.
More hunters cancelled their cloaks around him until he counted ten, the wounded one included. One was larger and older, darker-skinned, its armor heavy with trophies from other hunts. The wounded hunter bent its head back and offered its throat, and the leader's twin blades took the head. Harrigan read it as the penalty for failure. The killing stroke did not come for him. The leader tossed him an ancient matchlock with a silver forestock and buttcap, an Italian-script name, and the date 1640. A gauntlet command opened a hatch. Harrigan ran a dark tunnel as the camouflaged ship tore loose, left a crater, and climbed. Garber set the Jet Ranger down by the hole and said they had come so close. Harrigan told him they would get another chance. He walked away from the crater with the matchlock, thinking he had got the hunter for Danny.
The Hunter
The book never uses the word Yautja. The creature is the Predator, the hunter, or an alien. It is the film's City Hunter in kit, not Monette's shapeshifter from the 1987 novelization. A rigid self-destruct code if a hunter is beaten, and the automatic return of a dead hunter's ship, are how the species kept its technology off other worlds. This hunter had studied humans for centuries as tribal game that was getting smarter. Dutch was the first human who had beaten one of them, and the new hunter came to test that claim in a city full of armed warriors.
It sorted people into warriors and worker drones. Drones were slow and easy, useful only if the population needed culling. Warriors were the hunt. Harrigan was the prize. Killing Danny, then Jerry, was a way to push him into a frenzy that would make the finish worth the stalk.
The helmet ran heat sight, deep body scans, and a photonic memory bank. The cloak bent light. Close weapons were blades, a telescoping spear, a net, and the disc. The shoulder cannon fired on the subway. Blood was bright green, not Monette's amber jelly.
A panel on the ship hid a block of gel that held polished human skulls with the vertebrae still attached. Willie went in with the dreadlocks. There is no Xenomorph skull and no dinosaur skull in that case. The ethics of the hunt also barred a gravid female. The hunter called that game management, then left Leona on the tunnel floor.
Confirmed Kills
The hunter took the Scorpios in the loft, including El Scorpio on the roof, then the Jamaicans in Vega's penthouse, including Gold Tooth. Vega was already hanging when that fight started, and he did not survive the night. Danny Archuleta died in the rafters. King Willie died in the alley with an empty Uzi.
On the subway it burned armed commuters with the plasma cannon, killed Jerry Lambert, and tore at least one more skull loose on the next platform while Harrigan watched. Keyes's slaughterhouse team died in the nitrogen trap. Keyes himself did not walk out of that building. Leona lived because she was pregnant. Harrigan lived because the elder stopped the fight. Harrigan wounded the hunter with the disc and did not deliver the last blow. The older hunter beheaded it in front of him. The hunters left on the ship, the dead one with them, and Garber watched the vapor trail from the crater.
Key Characters
- Mike Harrigan was the Metro lieutenant who refused Heinemann's hold order, lost Danny, and drove the disc into the hunter. He left the crater with a 1640 matchlock and no federal job waiting.
- Danny Archuleta was Harrigan's childhood friend and long-time partner. He found the dart in Vega's penthouse, touched the cloaked hunter, and died in the rafters. His skull went to the clock tower.
- Leona Cantrell was a Metro detective, twenty-eight in the tavern scene, married to Rick. The hunter scanned a second life in her abdomen and dropped her. Paramedics confirmed the pregnancy after the subway.
- Jerry Lambert was the Rampart transfer they called the Lone Ranger. He died hanging from the subway straps after the hunter followed him and Leona onto the train.
- Peter Keyes ran the federal capture team. He had interviewed Dutch in hospital ten years earlier, meant to freeze this hunter with nitrogen, and died in the slaughterhouse.
- Dutch Schaefer appears only in Keyes's memory. He survived the jungle hunt, passed the polygraphs, then ripped out his tubes and vanished. The book never brings him back to Los Angeles.
- King Willie ran the Jamaican crew that hit Vega. He read the hunter in thrown bones, met it with an Uzi, and ended in the gel case with his dreadlocks.
- Tony Pope was the newsman who treated every scene as his story, from the Colombian loft to Danny's funeral. Hawke gives him long stretches of viewpoint the film never did.
- Irene Edwards was the morgue doctor who kept one chemical fragment after the feds erased her files and pointed Harrigan at the slaughterhouse.
- Garber was Keyes's man on the cameras and the Jet Ranger. He landed at the crater after the ship lifted and told Harrigan they had come so close.
- Captain Pilgrim ran Metro from a failing window unit and told Harrigan to leave Keyes alone. He did not believe that order would hold.
- Heinemann was the deputy chief who had been closer to Harrigan before the promotion, and spent the book trying to keep him behind a perimeter. At the subway he asked for help and did not get it.
Place In The Books
The novel is a film novelization, published in 1990 after Monette's book and before Archer's Concrete Jungle and the later Titan novels. It is not a comic expansion and not part of the Alien vs. Predator line. The year is 1995, two years earlier than the film's 1997 Los Angeles, and the jungle hunt is still dated ten years earlier, which puts Dutch in 1985 rather than 1987. Hawke is the writer who sent the jungle recordings home and put Dutch in a hospital room with Keyes, a sequel path Monette's book does not take.
The book never names the Lost Tribe, Greyback, or Raphael Adolini. Harrigan counted ten hunters in that circle, the wounded one included, and the darker, older one beheaded it instead of letting him finish the disc stroke. The pistol is a matchlock dated 1640 with an unnamed Italian-script engraving, not the film's Raphael Adolini 1715 flintlock. The Dark Horse comic later printed Vito De La Mirandella, Anno Domini 1640, matching Hawke's year and not the movie's.
Editions
Jove Books, an imprint of the Berkley Publishing Group, released the first edition as a mass-market paperback in December 1990 at $3.95. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists 231 pages. The printed copyright is Twentieth Century Fox, and the cover credit is a novel by Simon Hawke based on the screenplay by Jim Thomas and John Thomas. Fabula Könyvkiadó published a Hungarian paperback, Ragadozó 2., in 1991, translated by Szántó Péter and listed at 221 pages. There is no UK English edition on the ISFDB record, and no later English omnibus of this text with Monette's book or the Dark Horse novels. The cover in common use is the Jove art: Danny Glover in the ship with the disc, under a bleeding red PREDATOR 2 title and the line "A Novel by Simon Hawke."
Behind The Scenes
Simon Hawke was born Nicholas Valentin Yermakov on 30 September 1951. He began publishing as Yermakov, including Battlestar Galactica tie-ins, then wrote as Simon Hawke from 1984 and later took that as his legal name. The books that made the Hawke name were the Time Wars novels, plus other film novelizations such as Friday the 13th titles. Colorado named him Writer of the Year in 1992. The dedication is to Joe, Tim, Mike, and the regulars at Muddy's Java Cafe in Denver, where Hawke wrote most of the book. Jove timed the paperback to the weeks after the film's 21 November 1990 opening, not to the same week. The jacket copy sells a superthriller starring Danny Glover. The chapters stay with Harrigan, Pope, and the hunter.
Hawke was working from a late Thomas brothers draft, close enough to the finished movie that the hunter keeps the mesh cloak, the plasma kit, the disc, and the slaughterhouse. That is the opposite problem from Monette's 1987 book, which froze an earlier shapeshifter draft. Book-only material sits around that shared plot: Pope's viewpoint, Leona's birthday at Ray's, Danny's funeral, Heinemann asking for help at the subway, and Keyes's hospital hours with Dutch. Hawke also writes from the hunter's side. Those stretches sort humans into warriors and worker drones, spell out why a pregnant female is left alive, and send a dead hunter's ship home on its own.
Danny Glover had played Roger Murtaugh opposite Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon films, and Hawke leans on that. Harrigan thinks he is getting too old for this sort of thing, and five more years of this shit, close to Murtaugh's line without printing it. On the drainpipe he thinks the stunt should have been left to Mel Gibson. The book also says a new hand can be grown and grafted once the hunter reaches home. In the film Harrigan finishes the hunter with the disc, then Greyback gives him the pistol. In the book the elder takes the head before that gift, with Harrigan frozen over a kneeling hunter and the rest of a ten-hunter circle stepping out of the mist. Both then have Harrigan come up from the underground berth to Garber and the OWLF helicopter.
Conclusion
Predator 2 is Simon Hawke's 1990 novel of the film, published by Jove Books. It covers Mike Harrigan from the Scorpios loft to the crater under Los Angeles, with a cloaked plasma hunter instead of Monette's spear shapeshifter, and with Dutch alive only as Keyes's unfinished hospital case. The book ends with the hunter beheaded by its own elder, the ship gone, and Harrigan walking away with a 1640 matchlock. It is one of the rarest Predator books: a single Jove paperback, no later English reprint, and no omnibus with Monette or the Dark Horse novels.
External Sources
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