Novels

Chris is in quite a few of the Resident Evil novels. Mostly The Umbrella Conspiracy (RE1) and Code Veronica, but he does make brief appearances or mentions in nearly all of the others as well.

The Umbrella Conspiracy

ENTER THE WORLD OF SURVIVAL HORROR...

Raccoon City: a remote mountain community suddenly besieged by a rash of grisly murders encroaching upon it from the surrounding forest. Bizarre reports start to spread, describing attacks from vicious creatures, some human... some not. Victims are apparently eaten.

At the epicenter of these deaths is a dark, secluded mansion belonging to the mysterious Umbrella Corporation. For years Umbrella has labored within the mansion, unwatched, ostensibly conducting benign genetic experiments.

Deployed to investigate the strange goings-on is the Special Tactics and Rescue Squad (S.T.A.R.S.), an unusual paramilitary response unit boasting an eclectic assortment of mission specialists: roguish Chris Redfield, former cat burglar Jill Valentine, dead-eye Barry Burton, and the enigmatic team leader, Albert Wesker. Together with the other S.T.A.R.S. operatives, they have good reason to believe they're ready for anything.

But, what unfolds as the S.T.A.R.S. penetrate the mansion's long locked doors is terror beyond their worst nightmares: creatures that defy the laws of life and death - the result of forbidden experiments gone disastrously wrong. Behind it all is a conspiracy so vast in its scope and so insidious in its agenda that the S.T.A.R.S. will be betrayed from within to ensure that the world never learns Umbrella's secret And if any survive... they may well come to envy those who do not.

The Umbrella Conspiracy retells Resident Evil 1 (Classic), melding the two scenarios together. Chris is a bit 'roguish', as the back cover so proudly proclaims, but he is actually characterised fairly well for the small amount of time he's actually in the book.

Chris is from the start suspicious of the Spencer Mansion, before the team even know they'll be heading near there. Seems he had a 'friend' who wanted to tell him something about the mysterious murders, but he never showed up to their meeting. Chris begins to suspect the mansion, as it seems to be the epicentre of the attacks, but despite the lack of any real progress in their investigations he keeps quiet about it.

Once at the mansion Chris is the first to investigate the area, and thanks to the tricky locks and puzzles around the place quickly gets himself lost, not to mention attacked around every corner. While Jill, Barry and Wesker deal with things elsewhere, Chris manages to find Rebecca Chambers and together they try to find their way out. Chris finds the dead bodies of both Forest Speyer and Richard Aiken around the mansion, as well as getting up close and personal with Yawn in the attic.

Eventually finding his way outside (thanks to Wesker, yes Wesker completing the Crests puzzle) Chris deals with the guardhouse. He has a brief scuffle with Neptune before Rebecca kills Plant 42 with the V-Jolt and they leave, finding their way through the already cleared tunnels and to the underground labs. Chris finds Jill and Barry after they've battled the Tyrant and they flee to the helipad. There Chris gets some welcome help from above in the form of a rocket launcher, and he blows the Tyrant sky high, allowing everyone (except Wesker) to escape safely.

-- Passage Quotes --

Chris had run it over and over again in his mind during the sleepless nights since Billy's disappearance, trying to convince himself that there was no connection to the attacks on Raccoon - and yet was unable to shake his growing certainty that there was more going on than met the eye, and that Billy had known what it was.

Barry walked to his desk, worried about Chris for the first time since this whole thing had started. He'd recruited the younger man for the S.T.A.R.S. a few years back thanks to a chance encounter in a local gun shop. Chris had proved to be an asset to the team, bright and thoughtful as well as a top-notch marskman and able pilot.

One summer when he was a kid, the chain had come off his bike when he'd been out on a ride with some friends. He'd ended up in a ditch about six inches away from a choice bit of roadkill, the dried-up, pulpy remains of what once might have been a woodchuck. Time and the summer heat had dissipated the worst of the stink, though what had remained had been bad enough. Much to the amusement of his buddies, he'd vomited his lunch all over the carcass, taken a deep breath, then puked again. He still remembered the sun-baked scent of drying rot, like thickly soured milk and bile; the same smell that lingered in the corridor now like a bad dream.

Chris lowered the Beretta, feeling a flush of pride. He was a high-ranked marksman, even had a couple of awards to show for it - but it was still good to see what he could do when given enough time to aim.

Code Veronica

A desperate search for her missing brother once again pits Claire Redfield against the terrifying bioweapons of the Umbrella Corporation. Her quest leads her to a remote island where a mad genius has unleashed every grotesque creature at his disposal to stop her from interfering with his horrific agenda.

Catapulted to the bottom of the world, Claire is at last reunited with the man she came to find. Chris Redfield has been fighting a one-man war of his own against Umbrella's most terrifying creations... and is now on a collision course with the man who betrayed the S.T.A.R.S. in Raccoon City. A man who should, by all rights, be dead: Captain Albert Wesker.

Chris surprisingly doesn't appear a whole lot in the CV novelisation, despite his large appearance in the game. The storyline follows the basic plot of CV (not to be confused with CVX), but this time a lot of the exploring and puzzle solving is entirely left out. As such, Chris' role gets chopped to only a few pages on Rockfort Island, and then a few more at the Antartic Facility, where Alexia basically leads him by the hand to finding Claire and then his escape.

He also appears in a short scene near the beginning of the book (not from the game) with him situated in Paris with Barry and Leon, and getting the message from Claire to come get her. Other than that, you'd be forgiven for not even noticing Chris was there.

-- Passage Quotes --

Hearing that she'd gotten tangled up in the fight against Umbrella was bad, all right - but knowing that Umbrella had captured her, that his little sister might already be dead ... it was killing him, eating him up inside. It was all he could do not to barge into Umbrella's headquarters with a couple of machine guns and start demanding answers, even knowing it would be suicide.

"She's alive," Leon said simply. Chris hadn't even been aware of how bad things had been for him until those two words. It was like his heart had suddenly been released after being gripped in a vise for ten days, the sense of relief as physical as it was emotional, his skin flushing with it. Alive, she's alive -

He ducked just before hitting the filthy, muscular body and set the grenade on the ground in front of it, on the run, as careful as he could be not to set it off - and then dived for cover behind the snake-worm's twisting body, tucking into a shoulder roll, covering his head as the animal started downward, shrieking -

Chris's shoulders relaxed, and he wiped his hand across his forehead, trying to rub off the sour-smelling gunk. "I could use a shower," he said lightly, and the tears finally welled up, spilling over her lower lashes. Chris, I thought I'd lost you too...