White Darkness by David A. McIntee
In Brief: Deciding they need a holiday, the Doctor lands in 1915 Haiti. However he, Ace and Bernice find that War and Revolution is in the air, voodoo's-a-plenty, an ancient evil is underground and there's a cave full of German scientists attempting to perfect Zombie-gas.
As you do.
White Darkness gets bonus points for being the first book since Nightshade *not* to be set in The Future. While the recent run have on average been very good it's nice to have a change of scenery and not have to deal with space-ships and endless metallic corridors. While there's nothing inherently *wrong* with lazer-guns and flying cars it's good that the series occasionally remembers that we want Adventures in TIME and Space.
However rather than being a historical romp we've got more of a Bond-film (I suspect McIntee's seen Live and Let Die a few times). The book is definitely not aiming for deep or meaningful and really the just wants to give the reader a fast paced and entertaining story. Even the Doctor gets in on the act and trades in his usual costume for a white linen suit.
Unfortunately a few things get in the way of White Darkness being the success I feel it should have been; one of the biggest being that it's a bit crap. I think the biggest problem I had was that while the book would make a whizz-bang! movie (if Doctor Who could be made on a Hollywood blockbuster budget) it feels like this is the novelisation *of* that movie. Very little goes under the surface and most of the book is basic description of what is going on with dialogue mixed in. As a result I found it difficult to really engage with what was happening. Characterisation suffers since the motivations (or even physical descriptions) are light. Often I found myself getting certain people confused with each other or even forgetting what they'd done previously (the first couple of chapters in particular are confusing for this reason). Thankfully once McIntee starts killing some of the characters off things gets a bit easier to handle.
The other problem is that I didn't really find that the plot worked very well, it felt like rather than a cohesive story we had a number of ingredients which have been mixed together with no sense of a recipe existing (A literary cake-wreck?). I was reminded of my recent watching of "Silver Nemesis" which was torpedoed by having too much going on while forgetting to have an actual story to tell (Time-Travelling Jacobeans, Cybermen, the Doctor AND Neo-Nazis all arrive on earth at the same time to get a living statue??!). So the mixing of historical Haiti, voodoo, zombies, Mad-German Scientists and Cthulu (sorry, I mean the Great Old One) just doesn't work since nothing really seems to fit together. I'm still not even sure if the Germans were even connected with the rest of the story except to provide an cavernous-lair(tm) within which to stage the climactic battle.
Plus the setting of the story in 1915 is a problem since these are very much Ve heev vays ov makeeng yew tawk! Nazi-style Germans. It'd be like having hippies show up in the 1940s.
It's not that White Darkness is bad, it's just that there are a few too many faults to really recommend it. There are some good ideas but it just falls over in the execution.
Lucifer Rising by Andy Lane & Jim Mortimore
In Brief: The Doctor, Ace and Benny visit a futuristic research base located on a moon circling an Impossible Planet filled with Angels.
And the cover-artists' inability to even approach an accurate likeness of Sophie Aldred is starting to become an art-form in itself. Yes, that's Ace holding the gun.
Many elements of Lucifer Rising reminded me of 2006's Doctor Who and CGI Devil Thing of Deathly Doom (or whatever it was called). However unlike its televisual counterpart the book doesn't suffer from a terminal case of the stupids (nor is it as Ood...). Despite the similar surface-trappings (off-planet team researching the left-over advanced technology of a long-dead race. Oh, and black-holes are involved.) the book has a tone and style that is quite serious and somewhat grim (although with the occasional lighter moment thrown in).
But the feeling I got most while reading was one of being rather disconcerted. Being so used to the normal Tardis Lands/meet new characters/see new place/etc the book through me for a loop since it starts some time after the Doctor & Co. have been in place.
And we don't even learn until the end why they went there in the first place.
While this sounds like a potential for confusion it actually works quite well. The technique really helps to keep you a little off-kilter so that you never *really* feel safe in this environment. While all is explained by the end it keeps interest-levels high as the reader has to try to piece together what is *really* going on and then go back and re-evaluate once certain answers are finally given. The novel also has probably the best written and realised non-regular characters since at least Transit and a great deal of intrigue to work though (things start off with a murder-whodunnit and ramp up to an apocalyptic climax).
We also have a much better use of new-Ace than in Deceit. After the events of Love & War (and really even since 1989's "The Curse of Fenric") we have a companion who has become so traumatised and bitter due to her relationship with the Doctor that she begins to willingly act against him. This rejection leads to a much more guilt-ridden Time Lord than anything seen before, as the Doctor realises that his earlier plans and schemes have hurt his friends and come back to bite him in the sonic screwdriver.
The thing that really struck me while reading Lucifer Rising was how much the books have improved and progressed since the unsure first-steps of the Timewyrms. This is really a very good book in any context. That's quite the change from the "for the fans" feeling that was present earlier on as the series has by now managed to transform itself into far more than just another spin-off.
I really appreciate that the publishers decided that the books would follow an on-going narrative rather than being a series of "one-offs". Many of the events in the novel are a direct result of what has come before, in particular all that has happened since the Doctor landed on Heaven back in Love & War. While someone could come to this book "cold" and still enjoy it having an understanding of how the ongoing narrative has built up to this point definitely does add (although it would involve willingly subjecting oneself to Deceit).
While it seems an obvious thing to do in this age of the story-arc it was quite the novelty back in 1993 after the far more discombobulated show we were used to.
I liked Lucifer Rising a lot. While not perfect (things go a bit wonky about 2/3rds through but thankfully recovers) it's another reminder that Doctor Who in book form was a very good thing indeed since it's freed from pesky things like budget and being meant for a "family audience" (I've never read any of the post-2005 so don't know if it's still the case). While of course I love that the show is once again on television reading through these books is reacquainting me to why I really started to love it so much in the early-90s.
Deceit by Peter Darvill-Evans
In Brief: Ace returns. And now carries a big gun.
To be honest Ace returning is really the only notable thing that can be said about Deceit. It's an extremely poor effort as a novel. While things start off promisingly and for at least the first half it feels like events might lead up to something interesting it just all falls apart by the end (and easily has the worst "defeat" of the enemy since Genesys). Not even the main villain Lacuna, a large-headed megalomaniacal lesbian with a giant vat of brains, can spruce things up. The big problem is that Darvill-Evans, despite being the editor of the New Adventures, seems unable to trim anything from the book. It's looooooong with many scenes that just go on and on with no purpose. Characters are captured, escape, have a gun-fight and are captured again.
Especially after the mid-point 20-page gun-battle the reader really starts to realise that many scenes can be skimmed as they add little to the plot. They just seem to be there since if the whole thing were actually a movie or tv-episode it would look sort of neat. I assume that the author was more trying to novelise a Doctor Who movie he'd really like to see but didn't realise that it's not as simple as just describing what you see in your head. Narrative sense and plot coherency are also helpful.
Also despite the rather camp Lacuna and her brains the book is extremely "macho", with Doctor Who-comic cross-over Abslom Daak, Dalek Killer (don't ask) being a cross of Rambo and Arnold Schwarzenegger (we get a lot of descriptions of his bulging muscles). This macho grunting butchitude extends to new-Ace, who instead of being the character we knew has transformed into Sarah Connor/Ellen Ripley after a few years in "the future". I don't understand the reasoning behind having her come back and rejoin the Doctor and the infinitely more interesting Bernice. I suspect that perhaps the desire was to have a more "action"-based character to contrast with the other more cerebral denizens of the Tardis.
It ranks as one of the biggest misfires in Whodom since they had an Australian and/or Matthew Waterhouse wander into the ship (and later outdone by having Catherine Tate foisted on all of time & space).
But what else to say about Deceit? As I said it's just really not good. And unlike other lesser books in the series it's not even ambition-gone-wrong (Witch Mark this means you). It tries to be a big futuristic space "epic" and just ends up being tedious and stupid. Possibly the low point in the series so far.
The Pit by Neil Penswick
In Brief: It's in some ways rather good. In some ways it's very bad. It's written in an odd style. With constant use of short sentences. And sentence fragments. And few commas.
Which gets a bit annoying.
Quickly.
The Pit has left me scratching my head a bit. "Known" by fandom as the *Officially Worst-Ever Doctor Who Book Ever Ever Ever* (based on a Doctor Who Magazine poll done back in the late-90s which put The Pit somewhere below a skin-rash in popularity) I was surprised to find that other than a few boring bits, and the aforementioned odd prose style, I sort of liked it. Well, maybe more that I appreciated the author's ambition. Although his execution not so much.
The story itself, or rather the "what happens" bits, is actually rather good. If grim. Benny asks the Doctor to take her to a Solar System which "disappeared" 50 years before her time so they could find out what happened. The location itself, and the events surrounding it's (spoiler) eventual destruction are well thought out and interesting (despite some unnecessary Doctor Who Continuity being involved). While there are no real stand-out characters other than the temporally-shifted poet William Blake(!!!) who accompanies the Doctor through much of the novel thankfully there's no-one as bland as found in likes of Time's Crucible or Witch Mark.
But I can't quite say that the book actually "works". Much of it feels like a bit of a slog.
A slog through short sentences.
There are a few factors that create a vague sense of tedium and I suspect they're the reason why the book has gotten a bit of a bad reputation through the years (amongst the few of us who have read the books that is). The first factor is the already mentioned writing style which is at best refreshingly non-standard and at worse downright irritating. The main thing that bugged me was how at times rather than get the text of a conversation we'd instead get a description of what was said. It means part of the book feels more like a precis than literature and makes the reader feel distanced from what is happening. Now while I imagine this was probably on purpose I have to question why the author would willingly write in such as way. Perhaps a firt-time novelist who thought it was clever?
Unfortunately when there *was* dialogue it was fairly awful. Characters didn't seem to be having conversations but rather spouting exposition and/or philosophy at each other. It felt less like people interacting and more like the author taking the opportunity to show off his religious/psychology knowledge.
The other thing I noticed is how the Doctor and Bernice are really peripheral to the events in the book. Actually, now that I think about it if they hadn't actually landed nothing at the end of the book would really have been any different. (Stuff would have still blowed-up-real-good). I suspect this probably annoyed some people who felt that this made the Doctor "ineffective" while ignoring that was probably the point. For once he's been caught up in a greater-power's machinations and is out of his depth. All he can do at the end is accept that fact and move on. I think a lot of people can't move outside of the context of The Doctor as hero and the attempt here to turn the character into something darker didn't go down well.
But despite the fact there are some really good ideas in The Pit the poor prose, meandering story, padding (exactly what was the point of the trip to Victorian London and Stonehenge?!!) and oppressively serious and dour tone keep me from recommending the book. Although I do appreciate that at least the publishers put out another book with its own distinct style and ambition (albeit one not realised).
I mean, if I wanted the same experience all of the time I'd watch Star Trek.
