Predator Novelization: Plot, Lore & Movie Differences
Predator is a 1987 novel by Paul Monette, published by Jove Books in June 1987, timed with the 1987 film. It followed Major Dutch Schaefer's rescue team from the Conta Mana coast into the Guatemalan highlands after a helicopter with three cabinet members went down. Monette worked from an earlier script, so the hunter changed its own skin, fought with a spear, and died when Dutch threw that spear through its neck and the egg-shaped ship exploded. Anna Gonsalves stopped the recovery gunner from shooting the mud-covered Dutch.
Plot Summary
General Homer Phillips ran the Balancan post on the Conta Mana coast and sent Dutch's rescue unit after a UH-1H went down eighteen hours earlier with three cabinet members. Colonel Al Dillon from Langley joined the briefing and took charge once they reached the objective. The wreck sat over the border in the Guatemalan highlands near the mouth of the Usamacinta. The men inside were dead, and the hunter that had skinned Captain J.S. Davis's team was in the trees.
Balancan
In September the heat on the Pacific rim of Conta Mana had not broken since June. Balancan had been a fishing village until Phillips turned it into a command post about ten years earlier. He was fifty-five, Code 4 BRAVO, and had come up from infantry corporal in the ditches of Da Nang. Dutch arrived first out of a UH-1H, cigar lit, and Conta Mana regulars shifted the team's gear onto two smaller assault helicopters.
The briefing sat in a palapa under the main hut. Phillips circled coordinates in pale green along the border and gave them less than twenty-four hours. Dutch refused outsiders until Dillon walked in, a career intelligence officer who had served with him in Thailand. Dillon cited the team's Sudanese embassy job in Berlin three weeks earlier, seven terrorists in ten seconds, and Dutch's refusal of a Libya hit because they were a rescue unit. Phillips said that once they reached the objective, Dillon evaluated and took charge.
The Wreck
Two assault helicopters, callsign Redbird Two-Two, put the seven men on rappel with no clearing and no backup. Blain Cooper handled weapons. Mac Eliot carried the M-60. Jorge Ramirez, later called Poncho, took point. Rick Hawkins was radio and medic. Billy Sole was the scout, half Sioux and half Italian. Dillon initialed the landing plan as if he were at a desk at Langley.
In the morning they found the UH-1H upside down in a century-cactus grove, tail gone and metal burned thin. The pilot and copilot hung with one round each in the head. Dillon took the flight plans. Billy read ten or twelve guerrillas pulling prisoners, then a second track of about six men in identical U.S. jungle boots, every print the same size and weight, marching like a machine. Dillon treated that second file as another rebel patrol.
The Skinned Team
The hunter watched from the trees as scales that could pass for bark. It tracked living tissue by heat and moved underground from root to root. On a volcanic hillside Billy found three men hung upside down by vines through the Achilles tendons, gutted and skinned, the muscle still twitching. Dutch recovered a discarded dog tag for Captain J.S. Davis, a Green Beret he had known since boot camp and had last heard running taxi flights to Camp David. Mac cut the bodies down and found two more tags whose names the book never prints.
Billy counted four hundred to five hundred rounds fired in all directions and no tracks of what they had shot at. The six identical-boot men had turned off somewhere. The rest of Davis's people, the guerrillas, and the "politicians" had not left the site. Dillon said he had not been told of covert work here.
The Guerrilla Camp
About thirty fighters held a hidden camp in rubber trees, with anti-aircraft guns, a heavy machine gun, and radios pulled from the American craft. A mustached captain executed a bound hostage in front of the team. Dutch took the camp at once. Billy knifed a sentry listening to a Walkman. Mac smashed a guard's throat. Blain stabbed the radioman. Dutch deadlifted a rusted truck off its blocks and wrecked the main palapa, then a pinecone grenade cooked the fuel dump.
The hunter's heat cells went blind in that fire and it pulled into the ground. Later it took a jackal form from a patch of hair at a cave mouth, its first hot-blooded mammal. Billy used a guerrilla as a shield until the captain shot his own man, then shotgunned that captain. An underground bunker held crates of ordnance and papers. Ramirez collapsed a cliff of escape caves with grenades he called a Tijuana yoyo.
The Real Mission
The three "cabinet" hostages were dead, and Mac read them as CIA. Some of the other dead were Russians with transport papers from a counterespionage unit. Orders in the camp called for a major offensive on the Conta Mana capital in three days, the city leveled and no prisoners taken. Dutch put that paper in front of Dillon. Dillon said the Company and the White House had used the rescue as cover to stop the invasion, that Davis had volunteered to pull the CIA team and flown too close, and that Dutch's men were expendable assets three hours from Texas.
Blain pulled a woman from the wreckage, mid-twenties, knocked out by a falling roof. Dillon kept her because she knew the network. Dutch wanted no prisoners. Dillon pulled rank on the radio, and she became his baggage.
Anna And The March
Hawkins found her name in a nylon billfold: Anna Gonsalves, no rank. Pickup inside Conta Mana was too hot, so the extract sat at LZ 49 just over the border. Anna had grown up in the capital with nuns and European governesses and treated the jungle as foreign ground. She tried for Dillon's rifle, and Ramirez put a gun to her ear.
High in a cottonwood the hunter settled on a humanoid form about seven feet tall, ice-blue scales from head to foot, three-toed feet, and a three-fingered hand. It was not the film's Jungle Hunter. It picked up a short spear that changed color to match its skin and began to stalk. At a flattened Mayan temple Billy went into a trance he had inherited and not been taught, a Sioux chant about a god-creature that had murdered half his people a hundred generations earlier and would return. He told Dutch that his people and the temple builders had sung the same song. Dutch shut it down and pushed them toward the pickup.
Hawkins And Blain
Anna clubbed Ramirez and ran upslope because crossing the border meant death for her. Dutch sent Hawkins after her and dressed Dillon down for using his men as a babysitter. The hunter could not take a human body the way it took other Earth creatures, so it seized a hawk and flew after them as a copy of that bird. In a bamboo alley Hawkins tackled Anna, then turned at her warning. The spear went through his throat and out the other side, and a spurred third finger hooked his leg and dragged him off.
They found Anna blood-splattered, Hawkins's radio and gun left behind, and three-toed prints about eighteen inches long that stopped after fifty yards. Dillon still said guerrillas. Dutch found Hawkins hung by the ankles from a sycamore, chest ripped and organs gone. It was the team's first death in seven years.
Blain went looking for a kill and heard a copied Hawkins ask him about a toothbrush. The spear entered at the base of his spine, came out the chest, and carried his heart into a bamboo trunk. Mac emptied both rifles into a two-legged shape the size of a gorilla with no hair. Ramirez's grenades put shrapnel in the hunter's shoulder, and the blood on the bush was thick amber jelly that glowed orange on Anna's pants. That night Mac left a 101st Airborne flask in Blain's pocket and called him the only brother he had.
The Ship
The hunter dragged Hawkins about half a mile to a dry lake bed five miles from the Conta Mana border. An egg-shaped copper ship sat there, a craft that had come sixteen million miles and landed on a bed burned out a thousand years earlier. Inside, it punctured Hawkins at the base of the spine, ripped out the head and column, and set the bleached trophy on a glowing shelf among many others. Higher beings on its home world never stayed in one body long enough to die. It hunted the seat of a man in the skull and spinal cord.
Camp radio called them Blazer One. Dillon claimed they were just over the border with two dead and guerrillas in pursuit. Extraction was denied, and they were ordered on to Sector 3000 for a prisoner pickup. Dutch shoved Davis's tags at Dillon and said the hunter that took Davis wanted the rest of them. After dark the hunter left the ship as cells that thinned into the air like a virus, and the copper hull faded with it.
Mac And Dillon
A wild boar hit Mac's foxhole and he killed it, and in that same noise someone cut Blain's bag open and took the body through the trees. Billy named the thing a Predator, and Anna said it changed color like a chameleon and used the jungle as a cloak. Dutch cut her bonds, refused the border run, and had them wire a corridor of claymores, a grenade in a tree, and a vine snare like a Mayan jaguar trap. At noon the net blew, the hunter came in open crimson with no camouflage, and an eight-inch limb slashed Ramirez's chest, so Mac ran after it and Dillon took a spare MP-5 and went with him.
A vine in Mac's hand became the hunter's claw, and a razor spur opened his windpipe and killed him at once. Dillon found the body and fired, then a spear took his arm above the elbow and a second throw opened his abdomen. Langley would never know their desk man died in that fight.
Billy And Ramirez
Dutch carried the wounded Ramirez while Anna led toward the river. On a log bridge Billy put down the radio and the rifle, painted black grease in three strokes over his heart, bound a medicine bag to his knife, and faced due north. The spear took his jugular and then cut down the chest. Before Ramirez could fire, another throw pinned his neck to the ground. Dutch kicked Anna off Ramirez's MP-5 and sent her to the chopper. A spear shattered his rifle and opened his shoulder almost to the bone.
Mud And Cyanide
Dutch fell through a false overhang, lost his boots and clothes in the river, and went over a thirty-foot falls into gray mud among tree roots. The hunter's heat sight could not read him through the cold clay, a weakness in how it hunted, and it left. A U.S. helicopter passed and saw no life. When Dutch woke he saw the mudded reflection and understood why he had vanished.
The hollow handle of Dutch's machete held a match, piano wire, tape, and two cyanide capsules. He built a seven-foot bow, four barbed arrows, a flash charge from a washed-up 40mm grenade, and a bamboo bang-stick with a belt-buckle firing pin. He cooked a paste of root, saliva, and banana sap, added the cyanide powder, and coated the arrowheads. Two hours later he was naked, painted in clay and ochre, and waiting with a bonfire as bait.
The Spear And The Ship
The hunter sharpened its spear in a U-shaped fork until the blade ran white-hot, then came to the canyon on Dutch's war cry. The first cyanide arrow missed by inches. A flash-grenade and the bang-stick put shrapnel into its neck and chest, and it fled on a trail of luminous amber blood behind the waterfall. In the alcove it put a heel spur through Dutch's thigh. Dutch put the next cyanide arrow into its neck. Camouflage failed as the skin went a sickly green and gray fluid came from its guts.
Near the ship a four-foot web of hair-fine wire tore a thrown branch apart. The clearing held at least thirty bodies, guerrillas and commandos, skins stretched on frames with the scalps attached. The hunter started the turbine and the door began to close. It dropped the spear at the ramp. Dutch crushed the handle, threw, and the shaft went through the back of the neck, blew the head, and lodged in the hull as energy arced through the force field.
Phillips and Anna came in on the lead chopper as instruments failed in the pulse. Dutch dived an embankment before a purple flash blew the ship to fragments and left a fifty-foot circle of white ash. A door gunner racked an M-60 on the naked figure in the smoke. Anna shoved the rifle aside and told them it was their man. Phillips held fire. She jumped down, put a blanket on Dutch, and the medic could not believe he was alive. Dutch did not tell them what he had seen.
The Hunter
The book never uses the word Yautja. The creature is the predator, the god-creature, or an alien. It is not the film's Jungle Hunter in kit or body. It wakes in a cocoon chamber under a stasis field of strobing beams, with a quadruple heartbeat later read as four hearts in Yautja anatomy. On the orbital screen it reviews Earth's cats, rhinos, bears, and elephants, then peels a human down to muscle, bone, and brain, and stops on an armed soldier as the prey it came for.
In the jungle it copies cottonwood bark, a banana palm, a jackal, a hawk, and a vine. At night its cells thin into the air so there is no host at all. The ship can fade the same way. There is no mesh cloak and no wrist computer. Heat sight shows living things as colored outlines and fails in white fire, variable flame, and cold mud. It copies voices: Mac, Hawkins, Anna, and Dutch's own question.
The kill weapon is a short spear that keys to its skin, thrown or recoiled, later sharpened white-hot in a fork. Wrist and heel spurs cut at close range. A hair-fine wire web sits near the ship and is not thrown in the fights. There is no shoulder plasma gun and no wrist bomb. Blood is translucent amber jelly that glows orange on Anna's pants and on the leaves. It takes the head and spine for the trophy shelf and skins the rest to study, not only for sport. It cannot inhabit a man, and that gap is one reason it keeps cutting them open.
Confirmed Kills
Before the team arrived the hunter hung and skinned Davis and two unnamed tagged men. The two UH-1H pilots were each shot in the head after a heat-seeker took the bird down. The guerrilla captain executed one CIA hostage in the camp. Dutch's assault then killed that captain, the Walkman sentry, the radioman, the machine-gun nest, and a large share of the thirty fighters, plus Russians found dead in the bunker. The six identical-boot men are never found as a living unit.
The hunter killed Hawkins with a spear through the throat, then took the spine and head to the ship. It killed Blain through the spine and heart, Mac with a spur through the windpipe, and Dillon by taking the arm and then the abdomen. Billy died on the log bridge. Ramirez died pinned through the neck. Dutch later saw Billy's heart and brain in the hunter's hands.
Ramirez's grenades wounded the hunter in the shoulder. Dutch's bang-stick and a cyanide arrow wrecked its camouflage. The kill shot was the hunter's own spear through the neck and into the ship. The explosion destroyed the body and the craft together. Dutch, Anna, and Phillips lived. The recovery crews flew out at sunrise over the Conta Mana border.
Key Characters
- Dutch Schaefer was the major who led the rescue unit. The jacket blurb calls him Alan. The chapters never do. He lost the team, killed the hunter with its own spear, and left the ash circle alive.
- Al Dillon was a CIA colonel from South Central Los Angeles who had worked with Dutch in Thailand. He hid the White House job, went back for Mac, and died in the trees.
- Anna Gonsalves was a guerrilla with no rank, city-raised, who saw the hunter undisguised. She guided Phillips to the mahogany crossing and stopped the door gunner.
- Billy Sole was the half-Sioux scout who read the hunter in a temple trance and stood on the log bridge with a knife and a medicine bag.
- Mac Eliot was Blain's 101st Airborne partner from Vietnam. He killed the boar, ran after the hunter, and died when a spur opened his throat.
- Blain Cooper ran the heavy guns and "ol' painless." The spear took his heart, and the hunter stole the body overnight.
- Jorge Ramirez was the Houston point man the others called Poncho. A falling limb opened his chest, and a spear pinned his neck.
- Rick Hawkins was the South Boston radioman. He was the first of Dutch's seven to die, and his spine went to the ship.
- Homer Phillips ran Balancan and flew the recovery. He held fire when Anna identified Dutch.
- J.S. Davis was Dutch's old Green Beret friend, found skinned with two unnamed men. The film's Jim Hopper does not appear under that name.
Place In The Books
The novel is the first Predator book, published with the film in 1987, years before Simon Hawke's Predator 2 novelization in 1990, the Dark Horse novels, and Golden and Morris's 2018 The Predator book. It is a film novelization, not a comic expansion and not part of the Alien vs. Predator line. The country is Conta Mana, not Val Verde. Isabelle's later line in Predators about a Guatemala hunt matches the border the team crossed here.
Billy's temple vision is the book's Native American link to the hunters, set a thousand years earlier on the same ground as the ship's first landing. The quadruple heartbeat in the prologue is the line later articles treat as four hearts. Hawke's Predator 2 book then sent the jungle recordings home and put Dutch in a hospital with Peter Keyes, a sequel path this novel does not take. Dutch's last act here is silence.
Editions
Jove Books, an imprint of the Berkley Publishing Group, released the first edition as a mass-market paperback in June 1987 at $3.50. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists 200 pages. The printed copyright is Twentieth Century Fox, and the screenplay credit on the cover goes to James E. Thomas and John C. Thomas.
Star published a UK paperback in September 1987 at £2.25, also 200 pages. The cover in common use is that Star art: Arnold Schwarzenegger in thermal overlay under a bleeding red PREDATOR title, with the line "A Novel by Paul Monette." There is no later English omnibus of this text with the Predator 2 novelization or the Dark Horse books.
Behind The Scenes
Paul Monette was a gay poet and novelist whose own books were not action novelizations. He published poems such as The Carpenter at the Asylum, then novels about gay life, and later memoirs of the AIDS years, including Borrowed Time after his partner Roger Horwitz died in 1986 and Becoming a Man, which won the National Book Award in 1992. Jove hired him for Predator the way studios had hired him for Scarface, from an Oliver Stone screenplay, and Nosferatu, from Werner Herzog. He died of AIDS-related complications on 18 February 1995.
The dedication is to Horwitz, the attorney Monette met in 1974. Jove timed the book with the film's 12 June 1987 opening. The jacket flap calls the lead Major Alan Schaefer. The chapters stay with Dutch.
Monette was working from an early Thomas brothers draft, written when the hunter's body was still unstable on the page. That is why the novel has scale-changing camouflage, animal copies, a spear, a wire trap, amber blood, and none of the film plasma kit. Stan Winston Studio rebuilt the film creature in about six weeks after the first suit failed in Mexico, and the finished movie kept the sport hunt, the trophies, the voice copies, and the wrist bomb the book never uses. The skinned team in the novel is Davis, not Jim Hopper.
Billy's inherited Sioux trance and the Mayan temple overlay are book-only. Dutch loses his clothes in the river, dips arrows in cyanide from the machete-handle suicide pills, and finishes the fight in a cavern behind the falls, then at the ship. The book prints racial slurs aimed at Dillon that the film cut. The film ends on a wrist-bomb countdown. The book ends after the ship explodes, when Anna shoves the recovery gunner's M-60 aside so they do not shoot Dutch.
Conclusion
Predator is Paul Monette's 1987 Jove novel of the film. It covers Dutch Schaefer from the Balancan briefing to the ash circle on the Conta Mana border, with a shapeshifting spear hunter instead of the movie's cloaked plasma kit. The book ends with the team dead, the egg-ship destroyed, Anna holding the gunners back, and Dutch alive and silent.
External Sources
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