There are plenty of Friday The 13th novels floating around, but are they canon with the movie franchise? John Carpenter's Halloween arrived in 1978 and helped set a template for the slasher genre. The original Friday The 13th was one of the first movies to copy its blueprint while upping the gore. It was a surprise smash and kicked off a long-running horror franchise. Like Michael Myers before him, Friday The 13th's Jason Voorhees soon became a horror icon
There was an avenge of one Freddy Vs Jason. There are currently twelve Friday The 13th movies, but a messy legal battle over the rights to the series has seen it stalled indefinitely.
A franchise as successful as Friday The 13th is sure to have many offshoots, and Jason has appeared in various comics and video games over the years. Even devotees may not realize there are around 20 Friday The 13th novels in existence. This includes novelizations of various entries, with Friday The 13th Part 3 - quite bizarrely - having been adapted twice. Among the Friday The 13th novels are a series of young adult books dubbed the Jason X saga. The question is, are any of these books canon?
That comes down to individual readers, as there's nothing in the Friday The 13th novels that really conflicts with anything in the movies. The Camp Crystal Lake Series, for instance, is set after the events of Jason Goes To Hell. These books see different characters finding Jason's cursed hockey mask - with one novel dubbed Jason's Curse - becoming possessed by his evil and committing killings. Jason is in Hell during those novels and doesn't physically appear, and in the canon timeline, wouldn't escape until Freddy Vs Jason. The writer of the novels Eric Morse later released an ebook dubbed The Mark Of Jason Voorhees which tied his novels to Friday The 13th: The Series.
Likewise, the Jason X spinoff novels, which include catchy titles like Planet Of The Beast - set on Planet 666 - and Death Moon, further build off the events of that 2001 sequel. This sees the military attempting to clone Jason and create new supersoldiers, but Jason escapes and does what he does best. Since Jason X was set so far in the future to avoid conflicts with modern sequels, these Friday The 13th books could easily be considered canon. Other spinoff novels like Friday the 13th: Church of the Divine Psychopath are more or less standalone, though this book directly links to Jason Goes To Hell canon, as it features the start of the FBI operation that resulted in his destruction. In the absence of a new sequel, maybe followers of the series should give the Friday The 13th novels a try. Canon or not, they have a certain guilty pleasure value.
