NA #8: Nightshade

Nightshade by Mark Gatiss

In Brief: Mark Gatiss gets his name officially on something Doctor Who related. If only we'd known that it would all end in tears (and "Victory of the Daleks")?

I didn't find Nightshade to be a bad novel or a chore to read but I just can't quite recommend it. For at least the first half or so I was actually thinking it was quite good (and indeed would make a far better introduction to the book series than anything that was found in the Timewyrm run) but by the end I was more than a little annoyed with what I was reading.

However after the tedium of Witch Mark I was just happy to at least have a book where events moved along at a decent pace and that interest was (for the most part) maintained throughout the story. I think the problem is that, much like his TV-episodes ("The Unquiet Dead", "The Idiot's Lantern", "Victory of the Daleks"), Gatiss is good at keeping his audience's interest but leaves them unsatisfied.

In Nightshade the main problem I had was that while the early parts of the book are effective as people are haunted and killed by ghosts from their past, the book just doesn't really seem to know how to turn that into an effective story. In some ways things are even *more* meandering than Witch Mark, although at least there's enough going on here that the reader doesn't really notice until the end that there's little in the way of plot. Basically creepy things are happening in a small village during the 1960s which seem to be related to a radio telescope that was built nearby.

Eventually the Doctor (and Ace) figure out the problem and sort it out towards the end of the book (in about 5 seconds). So until the Doctor presses the right button we get about 200 pages of characters who are introduced just to meet an unsightly end a few chapters later. Really Nightshade is a horror novel with some "Doctor Who" trappings. I think this is why the ending in particular doesn't work very well since it has to make a concession to the fact that in the "Doctor Who" universe blaming anything on an "evil force" (such as in a Stephen King novel) really breaks the rules. So the end result just feels lazy.

So while the book itself is enjoyable the poor mix of genres does detract, as does what seems to be a bit of a misogynistic streak on Gatiss' part. In particular the character of Holly grates as she never becomes more than a screaming and crying cypher who eventually meets her end due to her overly-emotional womanly "character flaws". I realised while reading that for the most part women seem to really be the ones to suffer in a lot of what Gatiss writes.: "The Unquiet Dead" ends with Gwyneth sacrificing herself (after being shown to be somewhat stupid and simple), "The Idiot's Lantern" has Rose end up with her face being sucked off for daring to be inquisitive and "Victory of the Daleks" probably has the least effective use of Amy of the entire 2010 series (and the only other female character's sole purpose seems to be cry when her soldier husband is killed). Ace in Nightshade even seems to have had a bit of a personality adjustment as she changes from her usual outgoing and effective self into a girly girl willing to settle down and get married when given the first opportunity. I may be reading too much into things here, but it does seem to be a trend that female characters just "get in the way" of the men being able to sort out of problem in Gatiss' mind.

Also interesting was seeing how many aspects of the novel would pop up in the episodes of the show that Gatiss has written so far. In Nightshade we have ghosts, nostalgic TV of the 1950s, WW1/WW2 military imagery, an enemy that appears to be a gaseous entity and a climax involving a giant radio transmitter/receiver.

So I think to wrap things up it really just reinforces my feelings that while able to spin an engrossing yarn Mark Gatiss is a bit of a hack writer (this generation's Terrance Dicks/Pip & Jane Baker?).

Although it was still an improvement on Witch Mark.