Hogan Reviews

As I mentioned in my previous post reviewing Welcome to Raccoon City I’d ran out of games to review alongside it, so I thought I’d instead pick up the next two RE novels which includes an adaptation of RE2, so it sort of works? Well, not really, but hey, why not? Underworld is another novel-original story so it’s another box ticked in my accidental bid to review every RE story at some point, so let’s take a look!

As far as “City of the Dead” goes, much like the adaptation of the original Resident Evil in the last double-pack of books it does a pretty good job of being a near 1-to-1 retelling, just with some of the puzzles and searches for keys removed for pacing reasons (explained away by having Ada be the one to solve them before either Leon or Claire arrive). What I did enjoy was the fact that S.D. Perry went with the Leon A / Claire B scenario, not knowing the opposite would end up the canon choice, so we get an adaptation of the “wrong way round” as Leon deals with William Birkin and Claire is on the run from Mr. X. It made it feel a bit different anyway, though obviously Ada is still paired with Leon and Sherry with Claire. The biggest change is a prologue where Jill, Chris and Barry meet up, discuss being scapegoated by Umbrella and then head off together for New York, which made the adaptation of RE3: Nemesis a bit tricky, I imagine! Plus of course S.D. Perry throws in a scene with her favourite original creation of the mysterious agent known only as “Trent”, though its less intrusive here.

The original City of the Dead cover, once again a really good mix of new and original game artwork.

So Leon is a rookie cop on his way to Raccoon City to start his new job while Claire is the sister of S.T.A.R.S. member Chris Redfield, coming into the City to find her brother after he broke contact with her a while back. The two meet up at a diner just as the zombie outbreak happens and ride together until getting separated in front of the R.P.D. police station. From there Leon meets a spy named Ada and deals with the ever-mutating mad scientist William Birkin, while Claire is constantly pursued by a giant Tyrant-like being known affectionately as “Mr. X”, while also meeting and trying to look after Sherry Birkin, the young daughter of William. Characters like the human taxidermy-loving police Chief Brian Irons and the terrified reporter Ben Bertolucci are present and die in the same way as the games, and Annette Birkin is also front and centre during the latter half of the book. Overall it’s a pretty faithful and decently written adaptation of the “non-canon” scenario of RE2, and that makes it quite unique, really!

As for Underworld? Well, it’s better than Caliban Cove anyway in that it at least tells a good, if not somewhat standard, Resi story. Leon and Claire have met up with the S.T.A.R.S. Exeter team of David Trapp and John Andrews (from Caliban Cove) and Rebecca Chambers and together they are heading to Europe to meet up with the Raccoon City S.T.A.R.S. to form a united front against Umbrella. Their plane however is taken over by the mysterious Trent, who informs them that he has a key lead in taking down Umbrella but needs a team, this team, to head to an Umbrella lab right away. Everyone is sceptical at first but when he reveals the lab is ran by Jay Reston, an Umbrella employee who has one of only three “Umbrella Codebooks” in the world, a document that could take them down for good, they reluctantly agree. Breaking into the facility proves extremely tricky but they manage to get at least to the hidden lift, but Leon, Claire and John are sent down to the lab while Rebecca and David are soon stuck on the surface.

The original Underworld cover, a good use of game art and old book cover art in the background, which is nice. Oh and who I assume is Reston in the middle. Hooray?

The lab is known as “The Planet” as it contains four massive artificial testing areas based on a forest, a desert, a mountainous area and finally a suburban area of a city, all of which have unique B.O.W.s roaming around. So of course Leon and John, as well as an unlucky mechanic called Henry Cole, are stuck having to trek across the different areas, trying to survive as Claire explores the lab and tries to track down Reston, who’s having a great time trying to kill her friends. Reston does call for backup though, which causes an Umbrella UBCS team of mercs to arrive on the outskirts and give Rebecca and David something to do on the surface. Throw in a new type of Tyrant called “The Fossil” which resembles a humanoid T-Rex (okay, that’s a bit weirder than normal…) and you have the makings of a fun Resident Evil story, just the lab is a hell of a lot bigger and more visually varied than usual!  

Overall Thoughts:

The new City of the Dead cover, featuring the same bland background and some CG zombies from the games. Boo!

“City of the Dead” is a perfectly fine adaptation of the Leon A / Claire B scenario from Resident Evil 2, while “Underworld” is a fun, short read that does a few interesting things but doesn’t stray far away from the core Resi storytelling (of the time the book came out). They’re both written simply and therefore make for a quick fun read, but neither will particularly have you gripped. Average overall, I won’t feel like reading them again, but unlike Caliban Cove I didn’t dislike my time with them either.

Obviously not much to say on the “City of the Dead” front, Leon kills Birkin, Claire kills Mr. X and they both leave Raccoon City on the Umbrella staff train alongside Sherry. The only difference here is that Rebecca and David, fresh from Caliban Cove, meet them on the outskirts of the city to help them out (apparently it’s very hard for S.D. Perry to write a RE novel without Rebecca in it!)

The new Underworld cover, similarly bland and featuring CG game renders, but I think would’ve made a better cover for City of the Dead, really. Unless Leon continued to wear his R.P.D. uniform after being saved in this timeline!

In terms of Underworld, well Rebecca is hurt but manages to survive on the surface with David’s help, while Leon, Claire and John survive the increasing insanity of The Planet and escape as the lab is set to explode, codebook in hand, while Reston is chased down and killed by his own Fossil Tyrant, in classic RE fashion. The lab explodes as they all escape. We do get something of an epilogue focusing on Trent though, where we find out that he was born “Victor Darius”, the son of Umbrella researchers James Darius and Helen Black. His parents created a “Tissue-Repairing Synthesis” that could do wonders treating wounds and the like but Umbrella was worried it would eat into their profits from healing drugs and painkillers so stole their research, gave it to Birkin (and told him to use it to create military B.O.W.s) and then killed James and Helen. Victor went dark and re-emerged as “Trent”, knowing the only way to take down Umbrella and get his revenge is to slowly weaken the company from the sidelines and then wait for the right time to strike. Not a bad little story, really.