It Came From The 90s -- Who Else Read Those Terrible Doom Books?

I've just had a horrible revelation. Kotaku published a summer reading list this afternoon, which includes a number of solid recommendations for video game-related reading material -- you know, reasons to leave the house the next few months. The list warped me back to riding home on the bus during grade school and reading through the series of completely awful books that were based on id Software's Doom series.

Wikipedia has reminded me just how ill-advised such reading was.

Knee-Deep in the Dead, Hell on Earth, Infernal Sky and Endgame were four books that had little to do with Doom other than a borrowed premise of bunch of monsters entering through a mysterious gate and wrecking havoc on humanity's occupation of Phobos. The first two books, from what I remember, were inoffensive, if unnecessary grotesque, action books. It probably wasn't terribly appropriate for my age, but oh well -- it was just a book.

But as I kept reading the story summaries on Wikipedia, the Doom books just get weirder and weirder. The summaries don't mention the awkward sex scene, either (chances are I thought it was super cool at the time, though). For example:

"Arriving at the alien base, later revealed to be beyond the orbit of Pluto, Fly, Arlene, and Albert encounter several alien species, although the only alien to pay any attention to the humans is Sears and Roebuck. The marines learn that humanity is of little interest to most of the aliens; the invasion of earth being of little more than a strategic move during a quiet period in an intergalactic war. This war is fought between two opposing schools of literary thought (hyperrealists and deconstructionists) over eleven pieces of prose left behind by the long deceased alien race responsible for building the Gates. Fly and Arlene also learn that there is no faster than light travel (although travel at velocities close to lightspeed), and that humanity is the only species in the galaxy that 'dies' or has religion."

Oh, it gets worse.

"Arriving on "Fredworld", the quartet find the planet deserted. They learn from reanimating a Fred body that the planet was invaded by the "Newbies", a new race of aliens that learn and evolve at a rapid rate. The marines find a Newbie, who leads them to a planet 120 light years from the Fred homeworld. During the voyage, the captured Newbie attempts to change the ship's course, expending all the braking fuel before he is killed by Fly. Sears and Roebuck are forced to decelerate the 3.7 km ship via friction and air-breaking in the planet's atmosphere, during which the stresses on the ship, assisted by a hit from a weapon on the surface, destroy the vessel as it crashes into the planet."

And I don't even know what this means. I doubt context would help.

"They chase after the Newbie-human ship, which is heading for Earth, although on arrival, they discover that the Newbies never arrived, likely having evolved out of existence as well (as affected by the Newbie soul the game-force had captured)."

C'mon, someone else had to have read these books.