Dead & Buried: A Novelization [Paperback]

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (Author), Ronald Shusett (Author), Dan O'Bannon (Author), Jeff Millar (Author), Alex Stern (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Warner Books [1980], [New York]; 1 edition (August 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446958867
• ISBN-13: 978-0446958868
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 3.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,378,982 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Welcome to Potter's Bluff.", March 6, 2002

By 

Chadwick H. Saxelid "Bookworm" (Concord, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dead & Buried: A Novelization (Paperback)

These words, spoken by the anonymous killers roaming the night around Potter's Bluff, a quaint sea side community, are more prophetic than one would think. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's novelization of the screenplay by the screenwriters of Alien, Dan O' Bannon and Ronald Shussett, joins a very select few books that are actually superior to the film's they adapt into print (Orson Scott Card's The Abyss and Dennis Etchison's The Fog are two others). You can feel the damp chill of the fog as it swirls around those unfortunate souls caught in Potter's Bluff after nightfall. As the bodies stack up the town's sheriff digs deeper and deeper into the mystery, but the answer he finds may cost him his sanity. Highly recommended.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a great book!!!, September 28, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (in the USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dead & Buried: A Novelization (Paperback)

I got this book in a yardsale a few years ago and just recently decided to read it. This book is fantastic. Filled with exitement and surprise, it is a book for those who like a scary tale in the dark. In the book the sheriff of a small town is trieing to find out the cause of strangers found burned to death left and right. The answer is more surprising than the act.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So vivid it blots out parts of the movie in my memory, February 16, 2011

By 

James R. Strickland "-JRS" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dead and Buried (Paperback)

Other reviews have said this novelization is better than the movie. I agree completely. I read this book in the early 80s, when I was entirely too young to be reading such books, and the opening scenes in particular are so vividly written that even now that I own the movie on DVD, I remember the scenes the way I imagined them from the book, rather than the way the movie shot them.

Potters Bluff is a nice enough place. It's a small, quiet fishing town long past its glory days, with good - if somewhat eccentric - people. This is the town Dan Gillis is sheriff of. He's a good guy, local, but went away to college and came back.

The only problem is that newcomers keep turning up dead.

Worse than that, as things begin to unravel, some of the dead newcomers aren't in their graves where they belong.

As Dan unravels the mystery, he begins to touch on the supernatural origins, his wife Janet's own involvement, and of course, the man at the center of the mystery, G. (ammera) William Dobbs, the coroner and funeral home operator, and discovers that, as bad as a town full of the walking dead are, there are even worse shocks in store for him.

Where the movie fell down with this story is where Yarbro's novelization really shines - the fleshing out of the characters that make the story go. Where the movie doesn't try to hide the identities of the townsfolk doing the killing, Yarbro can take the point of view of the outsiders who are being killed, and don't know these people. Where the movie plays up the whole idea of video verses a rather bent reality, Yarbro's treatment of that part of the story is almost vestigial, certainly not the driving visual metaphor it was in the film. Where the movie shies away from potential plot holes, Yarbro fixes them, resulting in a story that, despite a large increase in words, is tighter. Over and over she demonstrates how well she understood the script and how it worked, and yet expanded on it. Fleshed it out. Made it seem almost real.

When I had her sign my rather battered copy from all those years ago, Ms. Yarbro mentioned she wrote the novelization in less than two months. Wow. Just wow.

-JRS