'Doctor Who And The Image Of The Fendhal' - Terrance Dicks (Target)

 If there is anything that looks more dated than old Doctor Who cover art I have yet to see it...  :o)

A sonic time scan draws the TARDIS to the Fetch Priory on Earth. There, the Doctor and Leela discover an impossibly old human skull that is the key to a nightmare from the Time Lords’ past.

A murderous monster stalks the priory grounds; and within, someone is intent on unleashing a malevolent creature that feeds on death itself... 

I think this is likely to be the last 'Doctor Who' book (well, Target novelisation) spoken about here for a very long time. I've done enough comfort reading around Doctor Who anyway and there's also the inescapable fact that the more of these books I talk about, the less I have to say. They all follow the same lines structurally and thematically which doesn't leave you a lot else to talk about. One day, I'm considering copying an old review (just swapping the title for something different) and seeing if anyone notices… ;o)

But in the meantime, 'The Image of the Fendhal'. If 'The Curse of Fenric' was the story that scared me as a teenager then 'The Image of the Fendhal' is very much the book that scared the life out of me as a child. The opening scenes, which cut between an experiment that takes an unexpected turn and the resulting death of a hitch hiker build up tension very nicely to a well placed climactic scene which pushes you headlong into the rest of the plot. 

'The Image of the Fendhal' is another Doctor Who story simply told and very formulaic. You certainly get what you pay for here (in this case, a penny via Amazon New and Used…) Making up for this though is a really dark undertone of horror that props the story up. When even the Doctor is scared of the Fendhal you know that they are an enemy who will take some defeating. And you really feel the rising terror in the characters when they find their legs refusing to move as the Fendhaleen bears down on them… It's moments like this that make the story worth reading and I wouldn't mind tracking down the DVD to see how the story comes across on screen. 'The Image of the Fendhal' is a simple tale but also a dark one that taps into Doctor Who in a way that I don't normally find with the TV show. Are all Fourth Doctor stories like this (I seem to remember reading a few like this as a kid)?

I'm not sure I'll be in a mad hurry to re-read 'The Image of the Fendhal' (nostalgia will only take you so far after all) but it was fun while it lasted and still had the capacity to make the hairs on my arms stand up. Can't ask for a lot more than that really.

'Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood' - Terrance Dicks (Target)

Searching for the third segment to the Key to Time brings the Doctor and Romana to present-day Earth, where the travellers have to contend with stone circles, Druidic rituals and a not-so-mythical goddess known as the Cailleach. 

Unsurprisingly at the moment, it's all about comfort reading for me right now (which explains why it has taken me weeks to get to where I am with A.J. Smith's 'The Black Guard' but more on that another time…) and it struck me how the term doesn't quite gel with a lot of genre fiction. For example, last night I was after a comfort read and, at one point, it came down to a choice between 'A Game of Thrones' and 'The Stand'… I guess 'comfort reading', in this case, is more about familiar settings and
characters rather than the story itself and that's why you're looking at another Doctor Who post today :o) The Target novelizations are all about
comfort reading for me; familiar stories that I either read or saw on the TV, all wrapped up in cosy memories of cheese on toast for tea and lunchtime trips to the mobile library that used to park outside the shopping centre. And where is that shopping centre now, eh? It’s the foundations of an Asda, that's where it is. But anyway…

I never saw 'The Stones of Blood' on TV but borrowed it from the library, as a kid, and was scared by it just enough to make me pick up a copy again from the local comic book store (which is incredibly well stocked on Doctor Who books, I sense the possibility of another collection starting up…) and see what how the intervening years had treated it. These days, a Doctor Who book is normally good for a bus ride to work and back and 'The Stones of Blood' proved no different in this regard. It still had the power to scare as well, mostly through what is implied rather than what you actually see happen. The note of fear in De Vries' voice, coupled with the keen timing of the Ogri attack, makes for a nerve wracking passage and there are more of these interspersed throughout the book.

I'm at the point now, with the Target novelizations, where it almost goes without saying that 'The Stones of Blood' is, for the most part, a 'by the numbers' retelling of what viewers would have seen on the TV. Dicks does take time though to capture that quirky sense of two mildly eccentric
people bouncing off each other (the Doctor and Professor Rumford) although I wasn't so keen on the way he basically gave away the identity of the main villain very early on. I know people would have seen the show before reading the book (so it wouldn't have been much of a surprise anyway) but
it still felt a little clumsy, in terms of structuring a book, to do the 'big reveal' so early.

There's also a slightly disjointed feel to the book in terms of how it slips from 'slightly Gothic horror' on the Moors to the overtly sci-fi element of the tale. When each piece is taken on its own though, both are done very well in terms of atmosphere (my personal favourites were all the bits set on Earth, just on case you hadn't worked it out already).

A nice little read then. It goes without saying (so I should probably stop saying it…) that fans of the TV show will get the most out of 'The Stones of Blood' and that is probably why I enjoyed it as much as I did. I do wonder why BBC Books aren't republishing these books in omnibus editions or
something like that...

'Doctor Who And The Leisure Hive' - David Fisher (Target)

The Doctor and Romana arrive on Argolis in search of a peaceful holiday at the famed Leisure Hive. Instead they become embroiled in both a takeover scheme by the Argolins' historic enemy the Foamasi and the machinations of Pangol,the child of the Generator. If the Doctor can overcome a murder charge and a lethal encounter with the Tachyon Recreation Generator, him and Romana might just make it back to the TARDIS in one piece…

'The Leisure Hive' was one of those Doctor Who shows that I first saw as a kid and missed large chunks of due to being four (almost five!) and possibly being scared of the Foamasi. Or having to go to bed early, could have been either one really.

The DVD has been on my shelf for a little while, might get round to watching it over the weekend, and it was always far more likely that I would get round to reading the book first (even though I've had the DVD far longer), especially now I'm commuting a lot and am in need of some
seriously easy reading that doesn't tax me too much. What? The style of most Doctor Who books (well, the old Target novelizations) is to recount exactly what happened in the show, with minimal padding, and that is what I'm after at the moment.

It was kind of a pleasant/unpleasant surprise then to find that 'The Leisure Hive' delivered a little bit more than the regular 'run of the mill' Doctor Who novelisation. 'Pleasant' because I ended up with a little more to chew on but 'unpleasant' in that anything that means some kind of independent thought gives me a splitting headache. I suffer for my reading sometimes :o)

On the whole though, it's always nice to read a Doctor Who novelisation where the author steps out of the comfort zone and tries to add a little something new to the setting. Here, David Fisher gives us a little extra history of the Argolin, the Foamasi and how cultural similarities can lead to conflict. This is all done with a refreshing comedic tone that's reminiscent of Douglas Adams ('The Leisure Hive' was published four years after the 'Hitchhikers' radio series, roughly the same time as the book itself so I don't think there's any coincidence in the tone). I like it when a Doctor Who writer fleshes out background detail and even more so when the writer injects a little of their own tone into it.

The plot itself… Well, I've still to watch the DVD so can't really comment on how well the book compares to the source material. The plot does hold up well though; it's a little more linear than it at first appears but raises enough interesting questions to keep the readers interest (it did for me
anyway). I'm still not 100% sure how the Doctor got out of that final spot but sometimes you have to suspend a little disbelief when he's concerned and just accept that stuff can happen. I'm not blaming this on woolly writing; no, not at all…

I picked up my copy for a pound in town and the most likely way of coming across a copy of 'The Leisure Hive' is getting it second hand somewhere. Probably only worth the hunt then if you are a fan but a surprisingly enjoyable read if you do get yourself a copy.

‘Doctor Who: Sting of the Zygons’ – Stephen Cole (BBC Books)

The TARDIS lands the Doctor and Martha in the Lake District in 1909, where a small village has been terrorised by a giant, scaly monster. The search is on for the elusive 'Beast of Westmorland', and explorers, naturalists and hunters from across the country are descending on the fells. King Edward VII himself is on his way to join the search, with a knighthood for whoever finds the Beast.

But there is a more sinister presence at work in the Lakes than a mere monster on the rampage, and the Doctor is soon embroiled in the plans of an old and terrifying enemy. And as the hunters become the hunted, a desperate battle of wits begins - with the future of the entire world at stake.

Do you sometimes get a feeling of déjà vu when reading a book? Like you’ve have read it before, even if you haven’t? It’s not all that surprising when this happens, especially in genre fiction. There are only so many ideas to go round after all and all you can really do is hope that the writer brings enough of themselves to the book to make it stand out. For me these that’s part and parcel of what to expect when you pick up a sci-fi/fantasy book.

Sometimes it goes a little too far though and you find yourself wondering why you bothered to read the book in the first place. That’s exactly how I felt reading ‘The Sting of the Zygons’, a book that borrowed a little too heavily from Terrance Dicks’ ‘Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster’. Don’t get me wrong, ‘The Sting of the Zygons’ (there’s a nice little play on words with the title in the book) does its job perfectly well as a book, it certainly proved a viable alternative to cleaning out the bathroom last night. Zygon shapeshifting powers are used to chilling affect and the stakes are appropriately high for a Doctor Who novel; David Tennant’s Doctor is also portrayed very well. Normally you couldn’t ask for any more than that in a Doctor Who novel; normally I wouldn’t but ‘Sting’ was just too similar to ‘The Loch Ness Monster’. I found myself wondering why I was essentially reading the same story over again. It’s not surprising that the Zygons have never really been seen in the TV show if this what happens when you try to write a new story about them.

A tale then that wears its influences a little too heavily to be anything more than an entertaining diversion (although isn’t that what Doctor Who is at the end of the day?) Its short length, two hundred and three pages, saved the book as far as I was concerned. If the book had been fifty pages longer I would probably got quite cross with it (love the cover though).

‘Doctor Who: Illegal Alien’ – Mike Tucker & Robert Perry (BBC Books)

The Blitz is at its height. As the Luftwaffe bomb London, Cody McBride, ex-pat American private eye, sees a sinister silver sphere crash-land. He glimpses something emerging from within. The military dismiss his account of events - the sphere must be a new German secret weapon that has malfunctioned in some way. What else could it be?
Arriving amid the chaos, the Doctor and Ace embark on a trail that brings them face to face with hidden Nazi agents, and encounter some very old enemies.

I love ‘Doctor Who’ books, they’re a not very secret but definitely guilty pleasure of mine. If they’re not helping me catch up on stories that I never saw on TV, they’re filling in gaps in between the Doctor’s journeys and giving us even more stories to get into. The old Target novelizations will do me for half of my daily commute but ‘Illegal Alien’ is about three times the length and so has kept me going for a bit longer. It’s fair to say that ‘Doctor Who’ is one of those things that you either ‘get’ or you don’t and if you don’t get it then you’re unlikely to be picking the books up anyway. That automatically makes these books ones for fans only but the good news here is that ‘Illegal Alien’ falls very much into the ‘one that fans will very much enjoy’ category.

‘Illegal Alien’ has all the ingredients that any ‘Doctor Who’ story (book or TV show) needs to be successful, a lot of adventure all playing out for high stakes and being manipulated by someone who might just have outsmarted the Doctor himself. You have the iconic villain (in this case, the Cybermen) getting up to no good amongst a human cast who think that they are in control of things whilst being anything but. The Cybermen are great anyway but Tucker and Perry really bring them to life on the page with a real sense of presence alongside the destruction that they are able to wreak. This is one of the darker ‘Doctor Who’ books that I have read(maybe even the darkest) with the horror of the blitz combining with the horror of how the Cybermen increase their number. Tucker and Perry really take advantage of the fact that you can write stuff in a book that they would never let you show on TV. You have to experience some things by yourself to really get the full effect and these passages very much fall into that. All I’ll say is that the ‘Cyber baby’ is not as cute as it sounds, it’s not cute in the least bit..
Tucker and  Perry also really lay on the horrors of the blitz as well as the wider war itself; not only is the appropriate respect paid to a turbulent point in history but the constant bombing etc takes the reader’s attention off important plot stuff until it really matters and is a big surprise. We also get a sense of urgency as both sides are racing to use captured Cyber technology in order to win the war. People will do anything if they can then say that they are trying to do the right thing, this is used to develop certain characters in interesting ways over the course of the book.

‘Illegal Alien’ is a dark book then but it’s also a typical Doctor Who book with the Doctor and Ace running all over London and getting into all sorts of trouble before somehow managing to get out of it. It’s no different in that respect from any other Doctor Who story but again, Tucker and Perry avoid any potential pitfalls here by really capturing the two characters and what makes them so distinguishable. They’re doing the same old stuff but it’s the fact that it’s them doing it which makes proceedings so memorable. The fact that there are sub-plots dovetailing in and out of the main plot makes for an engaging read totally unlike some of the more linear tales that I have read in the past. There is always something going on and it all happens at a breakneck pace.

‘Illegal Alien’ is a book that it’s all too easy to get into and not as easy to put down. I was left hoping that the rest of the books in the ‘Monster Collection’ are as good and then I remembered that I reviewed two of them way back on the old blog :o) Click on the links for what I thought of ‘Touched by an Angel’ and ‘Prisoner of theDaleks’.

But back to ‘Illegal Alien’… It’s a great read and I totally recommend it to anyone who’s a fan or thinking of checking out ‘Doctor Who’ books, you won’t be disappointed (I wasn’t).

‘Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster’ – Terrance Dicks

Because not only do I have a few of these books still lurking on my shelves but I had a belting headache on the way into work and wasn’t quite up to tackling ‘The King in Yellow’. I’ll do that on the way home instead.

Doctor Who novelizations are almost pointless these days given that you can have a quick poke around online and just, you know, buy the DVDs. For people like me though, they will always be a reminder of the days when these books were the only way that you could catch up with Doctor Who adventures that were already years old by that point. Take ‘Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster’ for instance; when the last episode aired (20^th September 1975) I was only four days old so there was no way that I would have ever seen it. Enter the books then, nearly all of which felt like they were written by one Terrance Dicks. The first truly prolific author in genre fiction? Not at all but it felt like it when I was five or six and just starting to go to the library.

I’ve brought more than a few Doctor Who DVDs since then but never watched ‘The Loch Ness Monster’ so, once again, I was very grateful to Terrance Dicks and his ability to seemingly pull a finished book out of thin air. You want some blurb? Well, here it is…

Centuries ago, a Zygon spaceship crash landed in Loch Ness. Now, with their home planet destroyed, the alien creatures plan to take over Earth. Their most powerful weapon is a huge armoured dinosaur-like creature of terrifying power that they brought to earth as an embryo - the Loch Ness Monster.
The Doctor, Sarah and Harry soon discover that the Zygons have another weapon. They can assume the identity of any human they capture. Who knows which of their friends might really be a Zygon?
UNIT faces one of its toughest battles as Broton, Warlord of the Zygons, puts his plan into action and the Loch Ness Monster attacks.

My commute into work is just over an hour (on a good day) and that was just enough time to polish off ‘Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster’; a light entertaining read that seemed to be written especially for a commute. There is nothing deep about this book at all; Dicks always seems to take the approach of ‘telling it exactly how it happened on the telly’ and that never seems to leave any room for character development or even a little more description of the background scenery. In a sense that approach is what made the Doctor Who novelizations so appealing to kids like me; the knowledge that what you were reading was exactly the same as what would have been on the TV. As a reader though, it’s hard to ignore the fact that ‘The Loch Ness Monster’ is very light on everything you would expect from a good read. There are thrills and adventure but there’s not a lot else. One thing that Dicks does do well though is capturing the essence of the main cast (again, tying it back to that whole ‘what you would have seen on TV’ approach). The Doctor has that hint of the alien about him, the Brigadier is very uptight (but resigned to the Doctors way of doing things) and Sarah Jane is resourceful and keen to do the right thing. It’s not enough to raise the overall quality of the read but does give you a feel for the characters and that’s always welcome.


‘Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster’ is more than likely one for people like me then, trying to re-capture memories of reading the Target novelizations as a child. That nostalgia will get through this book (and the rest) but if you don’t have that nostalgia, ‘The Loch Ness Monster’ is nothing more than a fairly enjoyable way to kill an hour’s worth of commuting.

‘Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric’ – Ian Briggs (Target)

I told you that some of the books here would be a little different from what I used to cover over at the other blog, didn’t I? I think there’s a real urge sometimes to concentrate on the ever moving conveyor belt of brand new books, headed our way, and I don’t blame anyone for doing that. I mean, look at all the cool books! Of course we’re going to want to read as much of that as we can. Inevitably though, it comes at the expense of all those old favourites (classics or otherwise) that you always mean to go back and read but forget to because, you know, new books and all that.

I’ve got a room stacked so full of books that it would be a crime to leave them all unread in favour of the new stuff and so this blog is going to be a healthy mix of old and new books. Well, that’s the plan anyway; we’ll see how I’ve done at the end of the year.

I grew up on the ‘Doctor Who’ Target novelisations; there was a library bus that came round every week (or something like that) and I used it to read as many of the books as I could. You can’t blame me really, there was no other way I was going to be able to catch up on all the adventures of the Doctor (in the days of ‘no DVDs’ etc) and there were so many even then. Those books were a massive part of my childhood and although most of them wouldn’t hold up to a determined read these days, I owe them a lot and have real fond memories of them.

Having said all that, I never read ‘The Curse of Fenric’ as a kid, it was the TV show that scared the life out of me and had me cowering in bed (but that’s a story already mentioned on the old blog…) I bought myself a copy of the novelisation, after reviewing the DVD back in July 2012, and promptly forgot about it because… new books :o)

Until now that is. I’ve been trying to mix up my reading a little bit, just recently, and this is where I ended up… Blurb shamelessly copy and pasted from the old blog because I’m tired and fancy cutting a little corner…

The Doctor and Ace find themselves at a secret military base, during the Second World War, where elements of the British army are about to lure their Russian allies into a deadly trap. A far deadlier trap is about to be sprung though as an ancient evil stirs beneath the waters of the bay and an old Viking Curse comes to fruition. Only those with faith will survive and, even then, they may not have much left afterwards…

What’s great about the old Doctor Who novelisations is that the reason they’re so good for catching up, with old stories, because they stick so faithfully to what happened on the show. You could see it playing out in your mind just as you would have done on the screen; just like the 70’s or 80’s version of a DVD ;o) They didn’t make for particularly challenging reading then but that wasn’t really the point. They were there so kids like me could read about adventures the Doctor had on TV before we were even born (and that’s pretty damn cool isn’t it?)

‘The Curse of Fenric’ really stands out from the pack by bucking that trend; I don’t think I’ve seen a Doctor Who novelisation like it in fact. It looks like all the stuff Ian Briggs wanted to do with the story on television made it into the book instead and the end result is a book with a lot more depth than you would expect to find in one of these novelisations. A shared history between Judson and Millington makes a lot of the stuff that happens on screen, with these two, suddenly make a lot more sense. Other characters get similar treatment (I would never have guessed who the double agent was or even that there was a double agent in the book…) and the end result is an extra layer of meaning that sits very well with the standard ‘tell it how it is’ approach that is going on at the same time.

What I really liked though was the mention of the game of chess that the Doctor played with Fenric; not just a mention actually, a full blown account of the game as told in ‘Ancient Arabian Tales’ translated by one William Judson. There’s an epic feel to the Doctor’s life now and Briggs does very well to tie up all sorts of plotlines that occur over centuries. That’s Steven Erikson territory and Briggs shows here that he’s more than capable of the same kind of thing.

Like I said earlier, the overall effect of ‘The Curse of Fenric’ is a really positive one and I’d mark it as one of the better Doctor Who books that I’ve read. I can’t get away from the feeling though that you would have to be a real fan of the show to enjoy this book and that’s weird because there’s nothing in the book to suggest this (other than that it’s Doctor Who and people either love it or are completely indifferent about the whole thing). I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

'The Day of The Doctor'

We don't have a TV licence so it's taken me this long to finally watch 'The Day of the Doctor', thanks to not only my phone refusing to get along with iPlayer but my my computer as well. Honestly... I would have been better off peering through someone's window and asking them to turn the sound up ;o)
I got there in the end though, I can be pretty bloody-minded where Doctor Who is concerned, and here's what I thought about the whole glorious mess. Before we get to that though, it's only fair to let you all know that I'm making the assumption (a pretty big one too) that everyone who wanted to see 'Day of the Doctor' will have seen it by now. There will more likely than not be spoilers lurking in the words ahead... Are we all good? Then lets go.

Every time I watch Doctor Who I have to make a little bit of room in my head for the five year old me who started watching all those years ago. We both loved 'The Day of the Doctor', a big old mess of everything that has made the show great over the years. From where I was sat, I was in awe of how everything seemed to just tie together, all those seemingly incidental lines, thrown out over the last few years, that have home to roost in a plot that was pretty darn tight. Not just the immediate plot either, I'm talking about all the stuff that is clearly going to be happening from here on in. Everything is different now and there was no sense of any compromises being accepted in terms of the overall plot. I liked that :o)

While all that was going on, the five year old me (ok, and the thirty eight year old me too...) was having the time of our life watching the Doctor do what he does best, save the day in the face of everything. Only it wasn't just the one Doctor it was all of them and that has to be one the most awesome things I've seen on TV, sorry Olympics Opening Ceremony... The three Doctors taking centre stage more than lived up to that focus. The Doctor's regenerations never seem to get on with each other and Matt Smith and David Tennant clearly had a lot of fun reprising all that sarcasm and put downs John Hurt's 'War Doctor' was a pleasure to watch, unable to believe what he was to become after what he had been forced to do. And Zygons, and Daleks and, well... everything else all thrown into the mix and dished up as slices of humour, action and pathos. Seeing Tom Baker at the end was the icing on the cake.

I don’t think I’ve been this excited about Doctor Who in a long time (it’s all good but the Matt Smith era kicked off on a bit of a meh’ note for me personally). I can’t wait for the Christmas special now :o) What did you think of it?