Stalking Shadows: The Predator Prequel Plot & Lore

Predator: Stalking Shadows is a 2020 novel by James A. Moore and Mark Morris, published by Titan Books as the official prequel to Predator: Hunting Grounds. It followed U.S. Marine Scott Devlin from the 1997 clean-up in Los Angeles to later hunts with Dutch Schaefer, then jumped about ten years after 2013 to the Communications Hub Scott ran while Dutch was still in the field. It was an original novel, not a film book, and it sat after Moore's Hunters and Hunted and Morris's share of The Predator novelization.

Plot Summary

Los Angeles, 1997

After the hunt in Predator 2, most of the OWLF capture team was dead, including Peter Keyes. His second-in-command, Garber, reached the agency helicopter on a downtown rooftop and found Dutch already swinging a rucksack into the cockpit. Garber knew the face under the camouflage paint. The last time Dutch had sat with OWLF was an empty bug hunt in a South American village, where he and Keyes had drunk together after a bad start. Keyes wanted him on their side, but Dutch still treated Keyes as the man who had burned him after Val Verde, radiation and all, and Garber did not believe he was the sort to let that go.

Dutch ordered Garber to fly. They circled the wreckage as the Lost Tribe ship tore out of the sewers and threw the chopper around. The City Hunter was already dead. The clan was leaving with the body. Harrigan was alive at the edge of the crater. Dutch told Garber to land, jumped out without a thank you, and treated the night as salvage. Garber went toward the crater himself, already thinking about the report he would have to write.

Scott Devlin was twenty-seven and newly off the Marines into an off-the-books unit under Captain Parker. They landed on a school football field for retrieval and containment, not questions. Sean Keyes, OWLF's regional director and Peter's son, pulled Scott off the street for firepower two blocks away. In an alley Scott found Dutch with a severed forearm in a combat gauntlet, then watched Sean recognize the older man and lose the argument. Scott's unit collected City Hunter gear from the wreckage, including the bio-mask and spear, while Dutch kept the arm.

Mexico, 1998

Scott's new circle at Hangar 12 was Marcus Thorne from Jacksonville, Louisiana-born Jason Flynn, and quiet Daniel Lau. On a cartel job in Mexico they freed about thirty hostages locked in a metal shed, then found a wrecked vehicle, a heavy impact crater, and a body tied in the trees with weapons left on the ground. Dutch was already working unofficially with OWLF by then, taking salvage to their labs, and he warned his men that a rival group of suits and mercenaries was after the same prizes.

Malaysia, 2000

In a Malaysian cloud forest, rain wrecked Dutch's ultraviolet goggles and they faced the smallest, fastest hunter he had seen, no taller than he was and quick enough to vanish between branches. They had already walked a ruined mercenary camp of skinned bodies and leftover guns. Water sparked on its cloak. A plasma bolt from the trees blew an abandoned jeep between Pablo and Jameson. The blast opened Pablo's shoulder to the bone and broke Jameson's ribs. The team dragged the wounded into cover and went to ground instead of pressing the kill.

Scotland, 2004

Sergeant Devlin took a counterterror team into the Highlands near Dornoch, using fake Highland Tours minibuses and an outdoor-pursuits center as a base. The target was an old schoolhouse that intel treated as an Al-Qaeda bomb factory. Inside they found skinned bodies laid in a row and green organic residue, the same pattern Scott remembered from Mexico. Dutch's unit, rumored under the name Havana, walked in next. Scott named him on sight, and Dutch confirmed both the name and the rank.

Mexico, 2005

Three teams, about forty men under Captain Jack Graham, laid siege to a cartel castle south of Arizona. Intelligence said Moreno was selling border crossings to Al-Qaeda. The castle opened up with armor-piercing shells and a rocket launcher, Graham was torn open in the med tent, and the assault fell apart. That night a craft came in toward the stronghold instead of away from it. By morning Moreno's men were stacked like slaughterhouse waste, some of them missing heads and spines, and green residue had shown up again. Dutch arrived, looked at the cameras, and treated the site as another hunt, not a cartel civil war.

The Notebook, 2006

About nine months later Captain Starkey sat Scott down for a visit from Major Alan Schaefer. Dutch put Scott's old red notebook on the desk, the one that had vanished from Hangar 12 years earlier, and asked what Scott meant to do with the links he had been writing down. Scott said he had been trying to put the questions in order for himself. Dutch kept the book, told him the wrong hands would have ended his career, and started feeding him photographs and crash intel instead of shutting him out.

Dutch said he had an understanding with OWLF. They liked to think he worked for them, and he used their labs and gear. He also warned Scott about a looser rival faction with money, mercenaries, and no paper trail on the salvage it took. Hunter incursions were rising faster than Havana could cover, so Dutch asked for Scott's team as extra bug-hunting on top of their counterterror work. Scott told him to put the offer to the whole unit.

New Mexico, 2007

Dutch took Scott's team to the Zuni-Bandera volcanic fields after a hunter shuttle came down in cratered forest. In the wreck they found a crushed hunter in the cockpit, torn sleep-pods that smelled like animals, and bones with blackened meat still on them. Jaguar-sized hunting dogs with mandibles and green blood were loose in the caves. One of them killed Flynn. Another tore Dorantes's left arm off above the elbow before Cook, Scott, Ishfaq, and Collins put that hound down and hauled him out. Ellison and a dozen mercenaries later faced Dutch over the salvage, then backed off when Havana outnumbered them. Dutch sent Scott's people home and promised to bring Flynn's body back.

Laos And Viner Hill

For more than three years Scott heard nothing. In February 2011 a note under his door sent him alone to O'Reilly's, a basement bar in Viner Hill, South Carolina, a few miles from the base. Dutch was thinner, his hair and beard whiter, and a red grid of scars marked one side of his face. A few months after New Mexico he had taken Havana into an empty village in Laos. The only sign of a hunt was a fresh human skull and spine on a hunter's spear rammed into the square. One female hunter, faster and harder than any Dutch had met, and in his judgment some kind of royalty, wiped the team, including Angus, Blaine, and Cook. She pinned Dutch to a wall with a razor net, cut the grid into his face, then vanished into the jungle and let the mesh fall away.

Dutch credited hunter biology for keeping him alive after Laos. He told Scott that OWLF had spent years developing a serum of Predator blood cells mixed with human DNA, hoping it could repair damaged human tissue the way hunter wounds close. He left Scott a blue USB stick of evidence against Ellison's faction, men with money and government friends, then a bar fight broke out with local drunks. Afterward they grabbed Dennis Morano, a broke local who had been paid to shoot Dutch in the head or chest during the confusion and run. Dutch let him go once Morano named the two men who had hired him on Maple Street, and told him to take the money and keep moving.

Venezuela, 2013

Captain Devlin, then forty-three, walked his team seven kilometers through wet Venezuelan rainforest after radio contact with Team Indigo failed. They were supposed to be looking into drug and people trafficking. A skinned body hung in the trees above a wrecked camp, and Scott told the men they were in an active hunting ground. A blast tore the clearing, Collins was yanked into the canopy and thrown back headless, and six of Scott's twenty-four were dead before Dutch arrived. Ellison and several of his mercenaries were already corpses at the treeline.

Combined fire brought a cloaked hunter down in a rain of green blood. It was almost three meters tall, blue-green with brown markings, and Dutch judged it dead after a hundred or so hits. He wanted the body whole for his employers and wore a salvaged wrist cannon from the New Mexico crash. Then a spinning disc took the top of Marcus's head off as he walked toward Scott. A smart disc had not been aimed at Scott. Minutes later a shimmering net settled over Lau and cut him to pieces against the rock. Another blast wrecked Scott's left leg below the knee. Ishfaq Bukhari lived. Marcus did not.

Epilogue

At Marcus's funeral Scott sat in a wheelchair and told Devon Thorne that his army career looked finished. Her son Michael promised to become a soldier and go after the people who had hurt his father. Dutch introduced a man in a dark suit named Adam Garber, who shook Scott's hand and said he had a proposition, then the funeral ended. About ten years later Scott ran a Communications Hub of more than forty people, walked with only a slight limp after stolen alien tech rebuilt most of the leg, and was married to Angie, with a four-year-old son named Marcus. It was their fifth wedding anniversary. Devon wrote that Michael had a place at military school and that Precious was fifteen. Dutch called in from China with a field team to wish Scott a happy anniversary, then signed off to keep hunting.

The Hunters

The book never uses the word Yautja. Human characters call the aliens Hunters or Predators. The City Hunter of 1997 was already dead in Los Angeles. The Lost Tribe left on a ship that ripped a crater in the street, taking the body, and Dutch took a severed arm in a working gauntlet. Later hunts showed cloaks that sparked in rain, shoulder cannon bolts, spears used as trophy poles, nets that cut to the bone, and discs that returned. Green blood was the field marker Scott learned to trust after Scotland.

The New Mexico crash was the first time the novel showed hunter dogs: jaguar-sized, mandible-jawed, green-blooded animals kept in ship pods and used to run prey on the ground. The Laos hunter was the only female in the text. Dutch was sure of the sex and guessed at royalty. The book does not name her, give her a clan, or describe Egyptian armor. Later Hunting Grounds material names her Cleopatra. In Venezuela the hunter they shot down was about three meters tall. A second attacker, still cloaked, then used a disc and a net after the first body was on the ground.

Confirmed Kills

Peter Keyes and most of the OWLF capture team were already dead when the book opens in Los Angeles. In Mexico in 1998 at least one skinned body hung in the trees before Scott's fireteam arrived. The Malaysia hunt in 2000 wrecked a mercenary camp before Dutch got there, then wounded Pablo and Jameson without naming the hunter's later dead. Scotland in 2004 left a row of skinned men in a schoolhouse. Moreno and his castle garrison died in 2005 when a hunter hit the stronghold after the human siege failed.

In New Mexico a hound killed Flynn and took Dorantes's arm. In Laos the female hunter killed Dutch's team, including Angus, Blaine, and Cook. In Venezuela the hunters killed Collins, Marcus Thorne, Daniel Lau, six of Scott's starting twenty-four before Dutch arrived, Ellison and several mercenaries, and at least one of Dutch's men who lost both legs in a plasma blast. Scott lived with a shattered left leg. Ishfaq Bukhari lived, and Harrigan had already walked out of the Los Angeles crater.

Key Characters

• Scott Devlin was a U.S. Marine pulled into Parker's Hangar 12 unit in 1997, later a sergeant under Starkey and a captain by Venezuela. He survived with a wrecked left leg, took a job after the funeral, and about ten years later ran a Communications Hub.
• Marcus Thorne was Scott's closest friend, from Jacksonville, married to Devon, father of Michael and Precious. A disc killed him in Venezuela in 2013.
• Dutch Schaefer was an unofficial OWLF contractor whose men used the rumor-name Havana. He landed in Los Angeles after the Lost Tribe ship left, lost a team in Laos, and was still hunting in China in the epilogue. The book does not give him a sister.
• Jason Flynn was the loud Louisiana Marine in Scott's first buddy unit. A hunter hound killed him in New Mexico in 2007.
• Daniel Lau was the quiet fourth of that unit. A hunter net cut him apart in Venezuela while he crouched beside Ishfaq.
• Ishfaq Bukhari was a Pakistani-American soldier from Illinois who spoke Urdu. He lived through Scotland, New Mexico, and Venezuela.
• Sean Keyes was OWLF regional director in 1997. He hired Scott for the Los Angeles retrieval and took custody of what the agency could keep after Dutch walked off with the arm.
• Garber flew the OWLF helicopter in 1997 after Peter Keyes died. A later man named Adam Garber offered Scott work at the funeral. The book does not say they are father and son, and it does not print the offer itself.
• Ellison ran a rival suit-and-mercenary faction that chased the same salvage. He died in Venezuela in 2013.
• Moreno was the Mexican cartel boss of the 2005 castle. A hunter killed him and his garrison.
• Dennis Morano was a broke man in Viner Hill in 2011, hired by two men in suits to shoot Dutch during a bar fight. Dutch let him walk.
• Angie married Scott after Rachel introduced them. Their son Marcus was four in the epilogue.

Place In The Books

Titan sold the novel as the official prequel to the 2020 IllFonic game. It bridges 1997 Los Angeles to a later Dutch still in the field, without naming a successor agency or a 2018 laboratory program. It is not a comic expansion and not part of the Alien vs. Predator line. Moore had already written Hunters and Hunted for Titan in 2018. Morris had already co-written that year's film novelization with Christopher Golden. Lists of Predator books often skip this title even though it is the main prose link between Predator 2 and Hunting Grounds.

Later game material names the Laos hunter Cleopatra and gives Dutch a sister. This novel does neither, and it never uses the word Stargazer. The handoff at the end is simple: Scott on the board, Dutch still hunting, alien medical tech keeping both of them moving.

Editions

Titan Books released the trade paperback in the United Kingdom on 14 May 2020 and in the United States on 26 May 2020. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database dates the first edition 13 May 2020. Titan lists 336 pages. Penguin Random House lists the US paperback at $16.00. An ebook followed on 26 May 2020. Blackstone Publishing issued an unabridged reading by James Patrick Cronin, running 8 hours 54 minutes, with digital audio in 2020 and CD editions that August. The common cover line is "The action-packed prequel to Predator: Hunting Grounds."

Behind The Scenes

Moore and Morris thank Jared Gerritzen and the rest of the IllFonic team, agent Howard Morhaim, Christopher Golden, and Titan names including Steve Saffel and George Sandison, plus TQ Jefferson, Jared Yeager, and Sylvia Son. Moore had already done Hunters and Hunted, Sea of Sorrows, and other Titan franchise work. Morris had already shared The Predator novelization with Golden and had a long run of horror novels and audio scripts. The book was written as a Fox-approved lead-in to the game, not as a recut of a film. Later summaries that write Cleopatra, Dutch's sister, or Project Stargazer into this novel go past what the book names.

Conclusion

Predator: Stalking Shadows is James A. Moore and Mark Morris's 2020 Titan prequel to Hunting Grounds. It covers Scott Devlin from the Los Angeles clean-up in 1997 through hunts with Dutch Schaefer in Scotland, Mexico, New Mexico, and Venezuela. The book ends about ten years after 2013, with Marcus Thorne dead, Scott running a comms hub on a rebuilt leg, and Dutch still hunting in China.

External Sources

• Stalking Shadows at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Stalking Shadows at Titan Books
• Stalking Shadows at Penguin Random House

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