‘Camp Crystal Lake’ – Unmasking the ‘Friday the 13th’ YA Horror Novels

After sending Jason Voorhees to Hell, and before launching him into space, the Friday the 13th franchise delivered a set of fresh and exciting stories. Of course, these other tales of the slasher icon can only be found in print rather than on screen. So overlooking 1994’s Camp Crystal Lake is understandable, especially after author William Pattison, writing as Eric Morse, revealed how the series was a commercial failure. It didn’t even receive a second printing. Nowadays, these four hard-to-find novels sell for a high price on eBay and the like, which only adds to their sense of obscurity. Yet for those who have read them, they tend to be pleasantly surprised, despite the fact that these books lack the most obvious element of any proper Friday the 13th story. 

Considering how Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday remains a polarizing entry among Friday the 13th fans, newcomers to Camp Crystal Lake might feel hesitant. Like in the ninth movie, the Jason found in these novels has become an abstract evil that lives on through others. So even if it’s not Mr. Voorhees dishing out the pain here himself, he’s still the one in charge. And in some cases, Jason’s proxies — or vessels — gain his bodily properties in addition to that legendary mask. Speaking of, it’s that infamous goalie mask that makes Jason’s killing sprees still possible, even after he’s been sucked into Hell and seemingly no longer a problem for Crystal Lake’s residents and tourists.

While the end of The Final Friday showed Jason’s mask being pulled down into the underworld — and by Freddy Krueger — it crops up again in Camp Crystal Lake. The first book, Mother’s Day, connects the series to the most recent movie by bringing up the last whereabouts of Jason. As Ned Varner, Crystal Lake’s answer to Norman Bates, explains to another visiting group of teens, Jason was not only dragged to Hell, the place of his disappearance is said to be Hell’s gateway. “A kind of doorway down to the worst evils you can imagine,” Varner said, before assuring his captive listeners that this portal is “shut tight” now that Jason is gone. As for the mask, it was uncovered by a hapless hunter named Joe Travers, who only found it because of Pamela Voorhees.

Camp Crystal Lake has the smell of an anthology series that ignores the movies in favor of easily accessible, self-contained stories. Quite the opposite, these novels tap into, as well as build upon, the preexisting lore. Mother’s Day even offers an answer for the questions surrounding Mrs. Voorhees’ severed head and where it’s been since Friday the 13th Part 2. Joe Travers, who wasn’t unaware of Crystal Lake’s most notorious inhabitant when he randomly unearthed Pamela’s buried head, was guided to the precise location of Jason’s lost mask. And through this Travers fellow, Pamela’s son was reborn.

Prior knowledge of the movies is helpful, but Camp Crystal Lake doesn’t leave its more uninformed readers in the dark. The series fills in the blanks whenever necessary, or just to dial up the tension. That said, a new chapter of Friday the 13th immediately gets underway in Mother’s Day. So apart from keeping Jason’s origins intact — his childhood drowning due to negligent camp counselors and his long stint as a relentless murderer — these books are something of a fresh start.

Other than Pamela Voorhees’ zombified head ordering Jason’s newest vessel to kill, kill, kill, Mother’s Day is, more or less, a distillation of the first few Friday the 13th movies. Those forewarned but unheeding young people stay at the abandoned cabins of Camp Crystal Lake for — what else? — a weekend of partying. All the usual archetypes are accounted for as well; Carly is the sheltered virgin destined for Final Girldom, her best friend’s older brother Boone is the reckless bad boy, Paul is the chiseled and horny jock, couple Kyle and Suzanne are wannabe hippies, French exchange student Monique is très easy, and Albert is the awkward outcast of the bunch. It’s another example of those disparate friend groups that are more common in fiction than reality.

When it feels like Mother’s Day is switching things up in the third act, namely by having Boone rescue Carly, the book drops a false ending that leads into a more traditional conclusion. The two surviving characters’ escape on motorcycle, after ostensibly defeating Joe/Jason, is thwarted once the shotgun-wielding villain blows off Boone’s head. The lone Carly and her enemy’s subsequent one-on-one match then includes the disembodied Pamela barking orders and insults from the sidelines. To defeat her more urgent foe, Carly simply and literally unmasks Joe, allowing him to succumb to his mortal wounds. As for Pamela, her unsettling presence ends here as Carly turns the gun on her. The object that began this nightmare is finally strapped to a rock and sunk to the bottom of Crystal Lake. Needless to say, this wouldn’t be the last time the mask was seen or used to carry out Jason’s bloodlust.

Friday the 13th fans could be put off by how Mother’s Day delays its massacre, and the characters make no lasting impression, but overall this first book is a decent beginning for the “cursed mask” saga. The series tweaked that divisive body-jumping concept from Jason Goes to Hell, making the end-result feel a bit more in tune with the classic movies. Yes, it’s someone else behind the mask, but that technicality doesn’t mean a thing to these new victims. A killer is a killer, and death is death.

The second book, Jason’s Curse, is a sequel to Mother’s Day. Carly has since gone away to college and tried to put the past behind her. Carly’s friend Kelly, on the other hand, can’t forget. She wasn’t even there that weekend, but her brother Boone was, and Kelly will never forgive herself for not somehow saving him. And now that Carly has revealed what really happened with Joe Travers, Kelly definitely won’t stop until Jason is destroyed.

Unlike Joe Travers, Jason’s next vessel is an interesting character before he dons the mask. An ample amount of backstory makes all the difference in why Big Red, a man with both intellectual and physical disabilities, lingers longer on the brain than that mere hunter. After pulling the mask from the lake, Big Red naturally slips it on and becomes possessed. This time, though, Jason’s host is carrying a vast amount of emotional pain with him, and tapping into that pathos leads to some very cathartic bloodshed. Meanwhile, Kelly, along with her boyfriend Doug and their roommates Tina and Miguel, heads to Crystal Lake to put an end to both Jason Voorhees and her hallucinations of an undead Boone.

In kills alone, Jason’s Curse pushes the envelope more than its predecessor. Here any preconceived notions about Camp Crystal Lake being tame, on account of its “young adult” classification and exterior, are disproven when Big Red offs two children and a baby. The book doesn’t spell out the execution in graphic detail, but lines such as “it was like his artificial leg took on a life of its own” and “it started kicking and stomping and—” leave little to the imagination. There is also Big Red’s own abusive upbringing that could cause additional discomfort.

The supernaturalism of this series was already unmistakable before Kelly’s showdown with Big Red. As she battles Jason’s latest incarnation, though, Kelly’s visions of Boone appear to corporealize, creating another adversary for her to fight. Is this actually happening, or has Kelly’s survivor’s guilt gone to the next level? Given how Crystal Lake is a hotbed for weirdness, it wouldn’t be hard to believe in an undead Boone or the gruesome trampling he received from Big Red’s bodiless and artificial leg. Whatever the truth is, Jason’s Curse was proof that Camp Crystal Lake was coming into its own and not just intent on rehashing the Friday the 13th movies. Psychologically intense, boasting complex characters, and just plain bizarre at times, Jason’s Curse was the first step in the right direction.

Following her encounter with Big Red/Jason, and before dying from her injuries, Kelly buried that indestructible mask in the same spike pit that killed her (philandering) boyfriend. Sadly, her attempt to prevent further tragedies was all for nothing, because the accursed item returned in The Carnival. And this time around, there are way more potential victims for that next Jason vessel.

The most standalone of the three novels so far, The Carnival doesn’t bring back any previous characters, and it instead focuses on the staff of the Fantana Travelling Fun House and Carnival and its unfortunate patrons. This road show has chosen Crystal Lake as its next venue, mainly because the unscrupulous owner, Vince Fantana, lost his insurance and now seeks out any area that wouldn’t know the carnival’s shady reputation. Suffice it to say, Fantana’s mistake is Jason’s gain.

That dreadful mask soon falls into the hands — and onto the face — of the carnival’s chief mechanic, Mitch Deever, after his rottweiler, Stump, digs it up. Without fail, that sleazy and muscled creepo with a hankering for young girls transforms into a brutal butcher for Jason. And on top of a madman maiming and dismembering the customers, the carnival itself is affected by the pure wickedness of the land it’s built upon (the next book states it’s hallowed ground due to it being the site of Jason’s murder). This airborne evil influences the carnies’ behavior, making them angry and aggressive, and it later causes the rides to malfunction en masse. The outcome is a cirque du catastrophe that pretty much no one survives.

Author Eric Morse cited Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse as an inspiration for The Carnival, and it shows as the book’s protagonist, Maxi, and her friends and teacher all enter what turns out to be their final resting place. Edgier than Carly and Kelly combined, Maxi brings a heap of personality — even if it’s nasty — to this story. And if anyone ever wondered how a Friday the 13th movie would turn out with a mean girl as the lead, then it might be something like this. Fully acknowledging her vexing behavior, though, the complicated Maxi still garners an ounce of sympathy, particularly when the ominous premonition of the carnival’s fortune-teller, Selena, comes true in horrific fashion. In almost Final Destination style, Maxi survived her whole ordeal, only to then be mauled to death by Stump the Dog. So, much to her dismay, Selena’s prediction was right: Maxi and her companions would all die that night.

When it comes to viciousness and chaos, The Carnival reigns supreme. The next entry, however, has the second-best setup in the series. Road Trip, which was the last book to be published by Berkley before they cancelled Camp Crystal Lake altogether, centers on the high school footballers and cheerleaders who end up stranded at you-know-where. After their van crashes on the way home from a game, the characters trek through a storm and take refuge at that ill-famed camp, where in due time, one of their own would try on Jason’s mask.

So while Road Trip is short on the third-act bedlam that ultimately elevated The Carnival, it does carry over those biomechanical vampire bats. Toward the end of the third novel, the fake bats in the funhouse are made real by the evil energy of Crystal Lake. And here they compete with Teddy; if this Jason incarnate doesn’t get to them first, Summer and her friends are sucked dry by these voracious bats. Their innards are said to be full of “blood and wire and gears and flesh, all intertwined.”

Road Trip is Camp Crystal Lake getting back to basics, although with a few effective adjustments. In contrast with Joe Travers, Big Red, and Mitch Deever, Jason’s fourth host isn’t an adult but a teenager. The Carville Hornets’ mascot Buzzy, played by the geeky and loathed Teddy, is wrongly blamed for the van accident, along with their getting lost in the first place. This constant maltreatment from his peers is what fuels Teddy’s rampage. And for the first (and last) time, there are two significant subplots that eventually intersect with the main story. One of these threads has a Crystal Lake trooper planning to kill both his cheating wife and her lover Cliff — his best friend — then pin the crime on the latter. The trooper had hoped to frame Cliff as a Jason Voorhees copycat until he himself is taken out by Teddy/Jason. As for the two amateur spelunkers who the trooper crossed paths with in the outset, Donny and Stu, they exist only to reveal a certain grotto. The same one where Teddy/Jason later brings Summer for a ritualistic sacrifice.

It felt as if Road Trip was the start of something bigger, but alas, the road ended there for Camp Crystal Lake. The series closed with Jason’s mask sitting inside a police station’s evidence room, “waiting for its day in court.” It wouldn’t be until years later that Eric Morse reopened the camp, albeit on his own terms. The author self-published what he had hoped to be the first volume of Camp Crystal Lake before Berkley went in a different direction. The Mask of Jason Voorhees, the unofficial fifth book, was the crossover that Friday the 13th fans had been waiting for; the movies and the television series of the same name collided in this ambitious and canon-defying story. The prologue also provides direct insight into Morse’s experience while working on the first four novels, including what was changed and cut, and what could have been.

There is a solid amount of Friday the 13th already in existence, but fervent fans can agree that having more Jason Voorhees is never a bad thing. Even if the star himself is largely MIA in Camp Crystal Lake, his spirit lives on.

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