A movie novelization is a book written based on the screenplay of a film. I have loved movie novelizations since I was in middle school. It's very different from reading a book that a movie is based on. Movie novelizations usually end up being pretty close to what you see on the screen though you will occasionally read some scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor prior to the film being released. Novelizations fill in some of the gaps that are left in the movies.
I'm not an expert when it comes to novelizations (books based on movie scripts). In fact, I can count on one hand how many I've read: TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY, HOOK (which was written by the ever pleasant Terry Brooks), and INDEPENDENCE DAY. I will say that INDEPENDENCE DAY was fun, and gave the reader a better glimpse of Randy Quaid's eccentric character. I also remember how they changed the final battle, wherein he flies his crop duster with a bomb strapped to the underbelly into the alien ship's guts instead of the fighter jet he uses in the movie. Those are the novelizations I've enjoyed; the ones that expand upon or change details to make the literary venture a different experience.
FLATLINERS: THE NOVEL is nothing like that. Truth be told, I liked the movie much more than this book. And I believe my enjoyment was squashed by the author the studio went with to pen the novelization. Leonore Fleischer comes from the school of old school horror, a time when adverbs ruled the day. If someone were to remove all the needless adverbs from this book, we'd lose around five thousand words. Yeah, it's that bad.
I didn't get a good feel for the characters here, as most of the descriptions of said characters were nothing more than caricatures of the actors who played the roles in the film. I even believe the film did a better job with the back stories, which is rather odd, considering that's the whole reason you read a novelization; for the inner thoughts and unspoken pasts of the characters. This novelization is written in omniscient, which means there's godlike introspection and head-hopping, but it also means we don't get any real one-on-one time with the cast. And that's a very unfortunate thing indeed, especially in a story like this.
In summation: I never thought I'd say this but the movie is much better than the book, and I can't think of a single reason to read the novelization. FLATLINERS is a classic, and if you haven't seen it, you should remedy that foible posthaste.The film gets a solid five stars, but this book barely makes it into the realm of three stars. And it only gets that because the story is the same.
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