The Predator Novelization: Plot, Lore & Movie Differences

Published: 18 September 2018
Author: Christopher Golden and Mark Morris
Publisher: Titan Books
Format: Paperback
Pages: 320
ISBN: 978-1-78565-805-1
Series: Film novelization
Setting: Monterrey / Georgia Halloween

The Predator is a 2018 novel by Christopher Golden and Mark Morris, published by Titan Books on 18 September 2018, four days after the 2018 film opened. It followed Army Ranger Quinn McKenna and a group of army misfits named the Loonies against the Fugitive Predator, then the Upgrade Predator. Golden finished a first draft before Fox recut the third act. Morris then rewrote the book to match that recut, so the printed novel is not Shane Black's unused ending. It was a later Predator novel after Paul Monette's 1987 book and Simon Hawke's 1990 sequel, and it sat beside James A. Moore's official prequel Hunters and Hunted from the same summer.

Plot Summary

The Fugitive Predator's ship crash-lands on Earth

A damaged hunter ship cut through the Hubble telescope and came down over Mexico. Before the hull failed, the pilot snapped a device called the Kujhad into his wrist gauntlet and left in an escape pod. A larger hunter followed that ship to Earth. After the crash, Quinn McKenna mailed the hunter's mask home from Monterrey.

Monterrey

Ranger sniper Quinn McKenna had the drug lord Gutierrez in his sights on a jungle hillside when the craft sheared a radio tower and bounced across the valley. Gutierrez's men had a hooded woman and a boy as hostages. McKenna still shot the drug lord through the head, then followed the burn trail to a small pod that looked more like a broken insect than a ship. A mask and a gauntlet lay in the wreckage. The gauntlet locked onto his arm.

Dupree reached the crater first. Rain was falling on either side of him and not on him. Haines dropped from the tree on a vine, opened from chest to gut. A cloaked figure put a plasma bolt through Dupree. McKenna tumbled through the open hatch, lost his guns, and fired the gauntlet by accident. The shot knocked the cloak off the hunter, pulped Haines's hanging body, and blew the tree apart. McKenna saw mandibles and a face he later compared to a shark, a crab, and a warthog at once.

A cloak marble from the gauntlet hid him as he ran from CIA agent Will Traeger's mercenaries, who wanted the passenger and the pod. Traeger came in chewing Nicorette and looking like the nicest man on the dirt road. In a cantina McKenna paid the bartender to mail the pack from the embassy, then swallowed the marble in a shot of tequila as the sirens arrived.

The Package

Unpaid fees on McKenna's post office box dumped the consulate parcel onto the floor of the family house. Rory McKenna, twelve, on the autism spectrum, and a chess prodigy at Lawrence A. Gordon Middle School, opened it in the basement. The helmet was too big. A trapezoid remote slid out of the gauntlet, and the symbols on it were a puzzle he could work.

Far from Earth, a larger hunter on a stealth ship watched the same symbols. Rory reversed a command sequence, and that ship dropped its cloak in open space. Sergeant Anya Martin at the 6th Space Warning Squadron in Sandwich, Massachusetts, caught the ion trail on PAVE PAWS, and jets went up from Tyndall.

Evolutionary biologist Casey Brackett was grading papers at a dog park outside Johns Hopkins when a jogger named Doug Amaturo tried to pick her up. She taught at Berkeley, walked two dogs, and also taught self-defense. Federal men used the old Stargazer passphrase about stargazing, took the leashes, and put a classified file in her lap: a Class 4 incursion at Monterrey, McKenna's photograph, and a blurry humanoid in the trees.

Stargazer

Traeger's people railroaded McKenna through a fake psych eval at the Veterans Administration in Chattanooga, then put him on a prison bus with other military cases. Nebraska Williams said he had put a bullet in his commanding officer. He had missed, walked to a hospital with the wound in his own head, and still had the scar under his hair. Coyle, Baxley, Lynch, and Nettles were on the benches. McKenna told Nebraska he had met a space alien. Nebraska believed him.

Casey signed a new rider and rode a Pave Hawk to a dam that hid Project Stargazer. Dr. Shawn H. Keyes met her in the underground lab. He said his father had run one of the first contact teams. A file photo labeled Los Angeles, 2005 showed a hunter in an atmosphere mask, and another photo showed a man who looked enough like Shawn that Casey took him for the father. The specimen on the table had human DNA. The book never names that father Peter Keyes, and it dates the Los Angeles picture to 2005.

Casey asked why they called it a Predator. Traeger said the data showed it tracked prey and treated the kill as a game. She corrected him. Predators kill to eat. Only one animal on Earth hunts for sport. A centrifuge by the table held a vial of clear fluid taken from the hunter's blood.

The Bus And The Breach

NORAD logged a 202 anomaly, and the supposedly sedated hunter opened its eyes. It snapped the restraints, put a scalpel through Agent Thomas Church's brainstem, and tore through the lab guards. It beheaded Keyes, took the right hand, and used both on the retina and palm scanners while copying Keyes's voice. Casey's tranquilizer rifle clicked empty. The hunter walked past her.

In the display case it took a scarred historic helmet, not its own, plus throwing stars. The borrowed mask synced to the one in Rory's basement and showed a boy at a worktable, then a school tag: Rory Declan McKenna, Grade 6, Gordon Middle School, GA. Casey grabbed the vial and followed green blood onto the dam roof as F-22s chased a silver pod overhead.

Nebraska crashed the bus through a fence. McKenna saw Casey chase the hunter along a catwalk, then she jumped onto the bus roof and shot herself in the foot with the dart rifle. A spinning blade blew a tire. Traeger ordered her cancelled for asking the wrong questions and for the missing vial. The Loonies stole Indian Scout motorcycles from the motor pool, and McKenna rode one through the mercenary who had been about to shoot her.

The Iron Horse

They hid among a bike festival at the Iron Horse Motel, under a marquee that read Corpus Christi or Bust. Nettles traded for the gun seller's Winnebago Super Chief. Casey woke with a troll doll, a foil unicorn, and a postcard on a tray the Loonies had set out like offerings. She took the shotgun, then put it down when McKenna told her Traeger's men had been ready to put a bullet in her head.

Casey said the hunter had human DNA and had been looking for missing gear. McKenna understood at once. He had mailed the evidence home. The group agreed they had to find the hunter and expose it, or Stargazer would pin the dead Rangers and the lab massacre on them.

Halloween

Rory went trick-or-treating in the helmet and gauntlet. Heat signatures filled the eyepieces. A man on a porch threw a rotten apple at the mask, the helmet treated the impact as an attack, and a side cannon burned the doorway and the thrower to ash. Rory dumped the helmet in the bushes and ran for the school field.

In the Super Chief, Casey put the stolen fluid under a portable microscope and called it a supermatrix of trihydroxy and amino acids. She told McKenna the hunters were trying to upgrade themselves. Traeger reached the house first. Emily McKenna sent him off, then later put her phone in the garbage disposal when Quinn called and she realized the kitchen was full of black-ops men.

Two hunter dogs found Rory under the scoreboard. One killed a security guard. McKenna's Subaru smashed the first dog. Nebraska put a bolt through the second dog's skull, and the animal lived, walking in circles, then later fetching sticks for the Loonies. The first hunter was waiting on the roof of the RV.

The School

Rory ran into Gordon Middle School. The jungle hunter followed, scanned McKenna, and went for a black remote that had fallen from the boy's hand, the same Kujhad the Upgrade later named on the baseball field. An eleven-foot arm smashed through the corridor wall, crushed the smaller hunter's cannon, and knocked it aside. McKenna grabbed Rory and ran.

In the lobby the smaller hunter seemed to stand and stare at them. A metal noose was around its neck, and its feet were not quite on the floor. The Upgrade had thrown it down the stairwell and hanged it, then yanked the cord through the neck. The head hit the floor and sprayed green blood. The film beats that hunter in the street. The book kills it over the stairs.

The Barn

Under a bridge, Casey put the theory together. The hunters took spines for DNA near the brain stem, not only as trophies. The new hunter's eyes looked almost human. Stargazer was named for a hybrid orchid. Emily's basement then lost its ceiling. The Upgrade tore a mercenary in half, used the spine as a whip, and left Emily alive because it judged her worthless. On Rory's table it found a hand-drawn map of the crashed ship.

A Pave Hawk caught McKenna, Casey, Nebraska, and Rory in a field. Traeger wanted the device. Mercs beat McKenna in a pen by a barn. Rory, left with Sapir and a cryptographer on Skype, said the hatch code was fifteen digits and had already drawn the map. Traeger used the boy's father as leverage and took him to the crash site.

McKenna broke a merc's arm, shot him, and freed Nebraska. The bolt-skulled dog brought Casey a live grenade in the loft. She stuffed it down a guard's shirt, jumped, and later met McKenna and Nebraska on the barn floor. The rest of the Loonies stole a pink Victoria's Secret promotional helicopter and came back for them.

The Crash Site

Traeger walked Rory through scorched jungle to the cloaked pod McKenna had found in Mexico. The hatch was sealed. Rory unlocked it. Inside, Traeger ordered a translator hooked to the mainframe and boasted that Harvard linguistics had been paid since 1987 to crack the language. Stasis cylinders sat in the walls with a countdown that had stopped mid-sequence.

McKenna used a cloak marble, walked into the ship, and put a dart through Sapir's eye. Traeger refused to fold with a gun at his head and told his men to shoot the boy's knees. Lynch, covering from the ridge, died first when the Upgrade's plasma took his arm and then the rest of him. He got a flare up before the hunter finished him.

The Head Start

The Upgrade tore through Traeger's remaining mercenaries, walked into the pod, and closed the hatch. A translator spoke in a machine mix of Emily's voice and others. It named McKenna the true warrior and the prize, then offered a time advantage. The screen counted five minutes. An electromagnetic pulse shut down the local vehicles. The Upgrade then destroyed the crashed pod so nobody else could have it.

Traeger pulled a compact shoulder cannon from a duffel of Stargazer trophies and stuck the sensor to his skull. A panicked mercenary threw a star without the wrist mount. The blade came back and took the man's hand. The Upgrade yanked another merc into the canopy and rained blood. Casey and McKenna left the one-handed man behind. The Upgrade later put a taloned hand down his throat and pulled the spine out through the mouth.

The Trap

Lynch had set claymores on a choke trail. Coyle and Baxley drew the Upgrade in with gunfire and a joke. The hunter decloaked at the entrance, refused the minefield, and put a blade through a tree and a mercenary behind it. Casey snatched a historic mask from Traeger's bag and used it as a shield. The mask woke, fired its side cannon, and knocked the Upgrade onto the mines.

Phosphorus and a flare put the hunter on fire. Traeger's pants caught. When Casey shouted, he turned his head, the cannon turned with it, and the blast took his skull off. Baxley jumped onto the burning hunter and stabbed an eye, then the Upgrade threw him onto a branch that went through his chest. A returning blade took Coyle's left leg. Coyle shot Baxley to end it, then died in the dirt.

McKenna, Nebraska, and Nettles chased the burning shape to a ravine. Smoke rose from the creek below. They treated that as the end, went back, and buried the dead. The book splits the last hunt here. The film does not. Hours later, at dawn, the Upgrade came out of the trees and wrecked the pink helicopter.

The Ship And The Swamp

McKenna stepped in front of the Upgrade and offered himself as the prize, the warrior the hunter had named after the head start. The Upgrade threw him aside and took Rory. Casey understood the wording. The hunter had asked for McKenna, and it meant the son, the next step it wanted to harvest. A larger ship decloaked in a quarry. McKenna, Nebraska, and Nettles got onto the hull. Rory warned that an automatic force field was coming up. Nebraska jumped and landed on the shield, then slid off as the ship rose. The field cut Nettles off at the knees.

McKenna's ankle buckled when he tried to jump, and he fell under the field. He rolled off the curve, slid along the underside, and climbed into an empty pod port. He remembered the hatch code, got inside, and shot the consoles until the ship lurched. A cable yanked him out a hatch. The craft skipped across swamp water and threw the Upgrade through a viewing port. Rory triggered the shield again and cut the hunter's forearm off against the hull. Casey, wearing the first hunter's gauntlet, dropped from a tree and sliced the dreadlocks. The bolt-skulled dog brought back the bomb cuff she had thrown away at the crater. McKenna loaded it on a projectile from the severed arm, Casey armed it, and the blast dropped the Upgrade into a scorched hole. Two pistol rounds through the left eye finished it.

Walking out, Rory buried a bandana with Nebraska's cigarette pack, Coyle's Tootsie Roll, and one of Lynch's cards. Casey added Nettles's foil unicorn. McKenna called them the forgotten ones. He looked at the dawn sky, pointed at a star on the left, and told the hunters to come and get them. The book has no lab scene and no Predator Killer suit.

The Hunters

The book never uses the word Yautja. The smaller hunter was the Predator, later the original, the one from the jungle. The larger one was the Upgrade, about eleven feet tall, with eyes Casey and McKenna both read as almost human. Traeger treated the first hunter as a rogue runner and the second as damage control sent to retrieve or destroy the ship.

Casey's working theory was hybridization. The hunters took high-end survival traits from the strongest species they visited, using material near the brain stem. The first specimen carried human DNA. The book never uses the film's climate-change line as a reason for more hunts on Earth. The Upgrade wore ordinary armor, not a grown subdermal shell.

The first hunter used a mesh cloak, wrist blades, a shoulder cannon, throwing stars, and portable cloak marbles a human could swallow or thumb. It copied voices, including Keyes's, and synced a borrowed historic mask to the one Rory wore. Blood was bright green. The Upgrade added a translator, an electromagnetic pulse, a returning blade, a metal noose, dogs, and a shipboard force field. It called the remote the Kujhad. After the five-minute head start it destroyed the crashed pod rather than leave the hull to Stargazer.

The first hunter passed Casey in the decontamination lock when she was unarmed and half dressed, the same judgment that later spared a wounded mercenary for a few minutes and then did not. Emily lived because the Upgrade treated her as insignificant. Rory was the opposite. The Upgrade hunted him for his mind, not a skull for a case.

Confirmed Kills

The jungle hunter took Haines and Dupree at the crash, then Church, Shawn Keyes, and the Stargazer lab and corridor guards. It also cleaned out a troop truck on the road from the dam, using stars, blades, and a severed arm to flash a thumbs-up at the driver. The Upgrade hanged that hunter over the school stairs and took the head.

The Upgrade then killed Lynch on the ridge, Traeger's crash-site mercenaries, and the one-handed man left on the trail. Baxley and Coyle died in the claymore clearing. Nettles and Nebraska died on the rising ship. Traeger died by his own cannon. McKenna killed Sapir with the dart and later put two rounds through the Upgrade's left eye. Casey, Rory, and Emily lived. The bolt-skulled dog lived too.

Key Characters

Quinn McKenna was the Ranger sniper who mailed the mask home, broke the bus out of Stargazer, and shot the Upgrade in the swamp. He buried the Loonies' things with Rory and looked at the sky.
Casey Brackett was a Berkeley evolutionary biologist recruited from a dog park. The film spells her last name Bracket. She stole the blood vial, cut the Upgrade's dreadlocks, and armed the bomb cuff.
Rory McKenna was twelve, a chess prodigy, and the person who reversed the stealth ship's cloak. The Upgrade took him for his mind. He unlocked the crashed pod and later buried the mementos.
Nebraska Williams was the bus driver who had shot at his commanding officer, missed, and walked to a hospital with the bullet in his own head. He put a bolt through a hunter dog, jumped onto the force field, and slid off the rising ship.
Coyle and Baxley drew the Upgrade into the minefield. Baxley died on a branch. Coyle lost a leg, shot Baxley to stop the burning, and died beside him.
Nettles flew Hueys, then the stolen pink helicopter. The ship's shield cut him off at the knees. Casey buried his foil unicorn with the others.
Lynch covered the crash site from a ridge and died on that ridge. Rory kept one of his playing cards.
Will Traeger ran Stargazer acquisitions, chewed Nicorette, and used Rory to open the pod. His own shoulder cannon killed him when he turned toward a fire on his pants.
Shawn Keyes ran the lab and said his father had headed one of the first contact teams. The jungle hunter beheaded him and used the head and a hand on the scanners. The film calls him Sean. The book does not name the father.
Emily McKenna painted, bought Rory two Halloween costumes he would not wear, and survived the Upgrade in the basement because it did not bother to chase her.
Sapir was Traeger's aide from the Mexico landing to the pod. McKenna put a tranquilizer dart through his eye inside the ship.

Place In The Books

The novel is a film novelization, published in 2018 after Monette and Hawke and after Titan's earlier Alien books. It is not a comic expansion and not part of the Alien vs. Predator line. James A. Moore's The Predator: Hunters and Hunted arrived on 31 July 2018 as the official prequel, with Traeger, a cut general named Douglas Woodhurst, and a Stargazer strike team called the Reapers. Golden had already written Alien: River of Pain for Titan in 2014.

The printed book follows the recut film more than Shane Black's unused third act. It keeps Casey's jogger and dogs, Keyes's father line, the hanging over the stairs, and the split final hunt. It drops the climate-change motive, the Upgrade's grown armor, Nebraska diving into an engine, and the Predator Killer lab beat. The unused Emissary Predators from Black's third act are not in the book either. The book never names a clan or a homeworld.

Editions

Titan Books released the first edition as a mass-market paperback on 18 September 2018 in the United States and the United Kingdom, priced at $7.99 and £7.99. Titan lists 320 pages. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database records 316 numbered pages plus two more. The credit is a novel by Christopher Golden and Mark Morris, based on the screenplay by Fred Dekker and Shane Black, from characters created by Jim Thomas and John Thomas. An ebook went out the same day. Blackstone Audio issued an unabridged reading by James Patrick Cronin that runs 7 hours 58 minutes. AST published a Russian paperback the same month, listed at 320 pages. The common cover is the orange Titan art: a hunter mask and a spine on a flat field, under the line "The Official Movie Novelization."

Behind The Scenes

Christopher Golden was contracted to write the book alone and turned in a finished draft. Fox then sent a second script that matched the recut third act, and Golden was on another job. His and Morris's agent, Howard Morhaim, got Titan to pay for Mark Morris to rebuild the last movement. Titan editors Steve Saffel and Gary Budden handled the text. Fox's Nicole Spiegel sent reference stills. The acknowledgements thank those four by name, plus Golden's and Morris's families.

Golden had already done Titan's River of Pain and other horror novels, including Ararat and Snowblind, and he had won a Bram Stoker Award. Morris had written the Obsidian Heart trilogy, Doctor Who books, and Cinema Macabre, which won the British Fantasy Award in 2007. The printed novel is the recut film with extra interior scenes, not a restored Black cut. Fangoria made that point when readers hoped the book would return the unused ending.

Book-only material sat around that shared plot. Casey kept the dog-park jogger, a beat the film cut after the actor in it became a problem. Shawn Keyes talked about his father, then died by scalpel and became the lab's keycard. The Upgrade hanged the first hunter over the school stairs instead of beating it in the street, and it wore ordinary armor. After the claymore fight the hunter went into a creek, the survivors buried their dead, and only later did it come back for Rory. Nebraska fell from the shield, and McKenna brought the ship down by shooting the consoles. Traeger died by the cannon on his own shoulder. Rory buried the Loonies' things, and McKenna looked at the dawn sky and told the hunters to come and get them. The book never added the lab scene with the Predator Killer suit.

Conclusion

The Predator is Christopher Golden and Mark Morris's 2018 Titan novelization of the film. It covers Quinn McKenna from the Monterrey pod through a Georgia Halloween hunt with the Loonies, then a larger Upgrade that came for Rory rather than for Quinn. The book ends with that Upgrade shot through the eye, the Loonies' mementos in the ground, and McKenna telling the sky to come and get them.