NA #15 White Darkness

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.