Doom Novels worth reading?

[Knight0wl]

Hey all,

I’m just finishing up reading Masters Of Doom and was gonna pickup Doomguy: life in first person next. 
 

I was looking though and was wondering what you guys think.

Are the old Doom novels,

Knee Deep in the Dead, Hell on Earth, Infernal Sky and Endgame worth reading?

Do they add anything to the lore? or contradict anything?

 

let me know what you guys think. Hooah!

[Boss]

Don't waste your time or money on them.

[Knight0wl]

Nice haha I was kinda tracking they weren’t very good but thank you for the heads up.

Edited December 22, 2023 by Knight0wl

[Average]

The two Matt Costello books aren't bad though they're more in line with Doom 3.  Sadly, the third never got published.  He has a completed version but the publishers weren't happy with the sales of the previous books so they put the kibosh on it.  We should harass him and get a Kickstarter going!

 

The four you mentioned are awful.  I actually just finished re-reading them as I hadn't read them since they came out.  A rampant, creepy sexist who constantly ogles and objectifies his 'pal',  Flynn Taggart  is a smug, arrogant Individualist 'character' - even referencing Rand at one point. 

 

The writing is derogatory and dismissive of the aliens helping humanity to the point of being outright racist.  It reads like a white colonialist talking about the savages in deepest, darkest Africa.  Actually, the characterisation of both mains changes drastically throughout and is really inconsistent. 

 

The goofy plot is childish and has nothing to do with the Doom games or universe.  Terribly written with really bad grammar and sentence structure, they read like a (not very talented) 12 year old's bad fanfic.

 

At a push, the first one is okay and it's the closest to the game.  The second one is really pushing it and the last two are, in my opinion, just about unreadable.  

[Li'l devil]

DOOM: Repercussions of Evil

[Maximum Matt]

The first one is only worth reading for the descriptions of the various levels and how the authors (yeah, there were two authors) tried to explain what the hell was going on (like for example, the "slough of despair" they start off looking down on it and notice it's shaped like a giant hand.  Stuff like that)