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2.0 out of 5 stars
"I Can Feel This Place Unravelling...", July 5 2004
Forms of entertainment are a funny things these days: first there was literature, and then movies that were either original, or based upon the earlier books. Now it's common to go to the movie theatre in order to watch a movie based on a theme-park ride ("Pirates of the Carribean") or a computer game ("Lara Croft"), or read a book based on a television series (titles from the "Charmed" series). "Chaos Bleeds" is another bizarre first: a book based on a video game based on a highly popular television series. Even if the words "based on the video game" wasn't stamped on the cover of this Buffy the Vampire Slayer novelisation, I suspect that most shrewd readers would guess that this was not your average "Buffy" book, given the sheer amount of action and fighting that takes place in it. In fact the lack of character interaction, the simplistic "find-the-body-part" narrative and the sense of surrealism that the other dimensions create adds to the atmosphere of the hack-and-slash world of video games. Buffy and the Scooby Gang are drawn into a massive arena of fighting when an old nemesis Ethan Rayne re-appears in Sunnydale and breaks to them some rather appalling news: he has made a deal with the entity known as the First Evil in a bid for power. The deal is that the two adversaries will choose five champions and pit them against each other. Ethan has chosen Buffy, Spike, Willow, Faith and (in the absence of Oz) Xander, who must fetch the five body parts of Cassandra Rayne, Ethan's ancestress who holds the key to destroying the First. But the First has his own champions, and has bent the rules a bit by selecting them from other dimensions, which means that previously defeated foes are now back in action: Kakistos, Adam, Anyanka, Drusilla and more. A little help comes from the wooden-dummy Sid, who apparently didn't get heaven-sent after killing the last demon in Season One's episode "The Puppet Show", and instead shows up to inform the Slayer about Hope's Dagger, the only weapon that can defeat the First. It is an interesting concept, and a good way to reintroduce popular characters that no longer have a place on the television show (I'm just sorry they didn't include more - what about Angelus? Darla? The Mayor? Snyder?), but it's perfectly obvious that its true format belongs on the Playstation/X-Box/Nintendo/whatever console. Page upon page is packed full of characters fighting: kicking, punching, stabbing, running, elbowing, shooting, head-butting...and needless to say reading action sequences are utterly boring compared to watching them on the T.V. (or in this case *controlling* them on the T.V.). Furthermore, "Chaos Bleeds" does some serious damage to the continuity of the show: it's set in Season Six (ie, Joyce is dead, Tara's still alive, Spike's chipped), and is seemingly unaware that Buffy goes up against the First once more in Season Seven, where she certainly makes no mention on the show of this particular run-in with the First, nor her triumph over It. Neither does it try to explain how Faith gets back into prison or what actually happens to Ethan (easily one of the show's most popular villians) after all this occurs. Which is a shame, since James A. Moore is otherwise so careful throughout the book not to contradict anything that has previously happened on the show, which is to the book's detriment. He almost seems afraid to gives us any new information on the characters that could have churned up my interest in the book's progression - for instance, he often mentions Faith's first Watcher (all we know about her from the show was that she was female and died messily at the hands of Kakistos), yet he doesn't take the opportunity to tell us anything more about her - not even her name! I've always found this to be an untouched mystery well-worth exploring, but Moore seemed reluctant to give us anything on the character's backgrounds that hadn't already been mentioned on the show (and was therefore already known to 99% of the readers). Maybe I'm being a bit harsh in my assessment - for all I know Moore was drafted into writing this novelisation, but the fact remains that it is a somewhat confusing and irrelevant addition to the stock of Buffy-inspired books.
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