DW Original Fiction Book of The Month. April: Nightshade

[Rob McCow]

I was thinking it's about time that we all got some of these Doctor Who books read. There's been approximately 400 original fiction novels released in the past twenty years.

We're also coming up to the 20th Anniversary of the first New Adventure novel - Timewyrm Genesys, released in June 1991! Now there's a fact to make just about everyone feel old....

So I suggest we choose books from the following ranges:

New Adventures / Missing Adventures
BBC Books (Eighth Doctor Adventures - EDAs, Past Doctor Adventures - PDAs, New Series)
Telos Novellas
Big Finish Short Trips

Missing out the Target novelisations for now, because I think the focus should be on original fiction. We could do a couple of Targets one day! Maybe as a separate project?

Anyway, at the rate of one a month, we should get through the range by approximately 2059*.

I think the idea should be to read the best ones, or the most interesting ones. I don't want to start a 'stinker of the month' club. So we should do a New Adventure in June 2011, but not necessarily Timewyrm: Genesys.

So to make this democratic, I'd like suggestions for April's book! Pick us a winner to kick us off!

[SiHart]

Nightshade- good NA to start us off?

Si xx

[Jon Masters]

<nostalgic sniff for old ezboard DW Book club>

Nightshade would be ideal, or maybe Love and War to introduce Benny

[Andrew Curnow]

If we're starting with an NA, either of those would be good - they're not all 'arc heavy' like some of them. The Highest Science, or Zamper, might be good suggestions as well perhaps.

[SiHart]

Nightshade I thought was a good one to start with as it's still availble on the BBC website.

Si xx

[Andrew Curnow]

That would sound like a good deciding factor to me!

Off to the BBC site then...

[Rob McCow]

...where you won't find it, sadly. It seems that the e-books have been taken down!

I will try to source another place to get a copy. Hmm.

[Anthony Williams]

If anyone's interested in ~ahem~ "acquiring" a copy, PM me before Thursday. Will probably be able to sort something out.

Ant x

[MacNimon]

Hows things going with this? I have a copy of the e-book on Photobucket, if anyone's interested, or still looking for a copy. It's easy enough to post a link to it!

I read it most recently last year, and loved it as much as I ever did. It's a bit too soon for me to read it again, but still this is a great idea! I've got loads of unread DW novels as well as many I'd love to read again.

[Rob McCow]

Don't forget, you've got 12 days left to read Nightshade!

This is as much a reminder to myself as anything.

Ace has never known the Doctor so withdrawn and melancholic. He is avoiding her company, seeking solace in the forgotten rooms and labyrinthine passages of his ancient time machine.

Perhaps he will find the peace he yearns for on his favourite planet, Earth, in the second half of the twentieth century — in the isolated village of Crook Marsham, to be precise, in 1968, the year of peace, love and understanding.

But one by one the villagers are being killed. The Doctor has to act, but for once he seems helpless, indecisive, powerless.

What are the signals from space that are bombarding the radio telescope on the moor? What is the significance of the local legends from the Civil War? And what is the aeons-old power that the Doctor is unable to resist?

Sounds exciting, doesn't it?

[Rob McCow]

There we go! I'm reading it! I've reached page 50 (or so).

It's absolutely the wrong book for the time of year, however! The action is set over Christmas in a rainy village in the north of England, Crook Marsham. Reading it over the sunny bank holiday weekend may not be ideal.

It seems to me that Mark Gatiss has read a lot of horror novels over the years. This is very much from the 'Doctor Who should be scary and Gothic' school of writing. What's not so great is that - so far - the Doctor and Ace have not engaged with the main story yet. This could be a non-Who horror novel, perhaps with Vijay at the radio telescope as the protagonist.

The stuff that's happened so far is remarkably nasty. Gatiss introduces a very large cast of characters and it seems that everyone has lost a relative either through the war or had a daughter run over by a bus or suffered still-born children. It's the endemic approach of New Adventures writers of making it more 'adult' by making it more brutal. On top of the background horror there's been a re-animated corpse turning up in a bath-tub and the sense that things are going to get worse.

However, in Gatiss's favour, we get to see a lot of the inner workings of the human characters. The stand-outs are Edmund Trevithick, ageing star of the TV show Doctor Who... sorry, Quatermass... sorry, Nightshade, there's Vijay Degan and the Abbot at the monastery. There's also a Doctor Shearsmith. Given that one of his co-stars on The League of Gentlemen is called Reece Shearsmith, you wonder if there's a link.

Then there's the Doctor and Ace. Good heavens, the dark, brooding, guilt-ridden Doctor of the New Adventures was a screaming pain in the a*£e! You couldn't imagine any other incarnation of the Doctor being so dour at any time. What's he so bloody miserable about? I'm wondering if we'll get a satisfying answer by the end of the book. It would be a bit annoying if he was only like this for Nightshade, but knowing the New Adventures he remains in this blue funk for years and years.

Ace is well characterised, getting understandably frustrated at the Doctor's lack of humanity and his lack of ability to make sense or have any emotive logic. She's eaten three egg sandwiches and a cup of tea, which is a bit much for a self-conscious teenage girl. To be fair, she only ordered the sandwiches so perhaps she let the yoke of the eggs touch her tongue or something.

The book is big on atmosphere. The prose in the unnecessary prologue is especially over-wrought, as the first Doctor (apparently) steals a TARDIS and some mysterious mystery man watches him go. From memory, this prologue is purely there because Gatiss wanted to write that scene and it doesn't particularly serve the story.

Also on Gatiss' fan-list is the tertiary console room, which is DARK and GOTHIC with a GOTHIC CONSOLE and DARK ROUNDELS. Having the scanner screen appear within a roundel is a nice idea though. He also specifies that the Doctor wears his dark jacket and a waistcoat instead of his usual question mark jumper. Because bright red question marks are neither DARK nor GOTHIC.

It's not been outstanding so far, I think there's been too many characters introduced too quickly and their stories don't intersect, but things are picking up a little.

[Rob McCow]

I reached the end of Nightshade this morning. It's certainly not a classic Doctor Who book, although it has a few things going for it.

From the point of view of Doctor Who, it's fairly original, but as a horror-story there are a lot of familiar aspects. It's an isolated village threatened by a dark sentience that picks on people's nostalgia and fear. Everyone has something in their past that they're ashamed of or beholden to and whatever that is eventually destroys them in a grisly fashion. That's why there's so many characters set up, because they all need to be killed.

If this were a novel twice it's length, there might have been sufficient room to get under the skin of these characters, Stephen King style, but all we get are a few brief sketches and the ironic death.

There could have been a lot of fun had with the Edmund Trevithick character meeting the Doctor. Edmund being the lead actor in Nightshade, a Quatermass-like show. They could have compared notes on defeating alien invasions. Yet their meeting is kept to a minimum. Neither Ace nor the Doctor are involved in Edmund's flight from his Nightshade monsters, an exciting sequence involving lift-shafts, a gun, a fire extinguisher and some squelchy eye-bursting inflicted on the aliens, which is the cardinal sin of the NA era. Too often the lead characters are sidelined, when they could easily have been involved in the action.

The ending was fairly exciting. Suddenly, the Sentience is able to move through time and goes back to the Cromwell-era castle explosion, before heading to the exploding nova. In a way, it's slightly non-sensical that an energy-strapped Sentience can suddenly move itself through time and fling itself across space purely on the power of nostalgia, but we're not in the realms of real science here. Even if Gatiss has done a bit of research on supernovas and black holes.

Then there's the business with Doctor Who being an utter b@*tard and not letting Ace leave in 1968. He could have said that she would muck up her own timeline, or that he needed her for a greater purpose, or that perhaps the very shallow relationship she was forming with Robin Yeardon clearly wasn't going to go anywhere. Instead he petulantly tricks her into getting into the TARDIS, whisks her away to another planet and then hides in the bowels of the ship when Ace realises what he's done. The Doctor, by this point, is a character who can garner no sympathy from the reader whatsoever.

So overall, Nightshade doesn't quite fulfill the NA remit of being too broad and too deep for the TV screen. It's certainly too broad - there are far too many characters for the story's length - and it doesn't go deep enough into those characters to be really affecting. On the other hand, in places it's far too nasty to be shown on TV. A light and fairly entertaining read, but also very frustrating.

[MacNimon]

I agree with you on some of your points, Steve, but overall I found the novel much more enjoyable than you did.

It's certainly not a classic Doctor Who book

This point though is one I can't agree with! However given our different tastes concerning the 7th Doctors tv appearances I can understand where you're coming from...I'm not a fan at all of the 7th Doctor or Ace, I never have been and probably now never will be. Of course in all media there can be great stories which make me reconsider, and I find that Nightshade is one of those.

It's the characters, as played by the actors on tv, that I'm not particularly keen on. Given that, I'm obviously at something of a disadvantage when it comes to reading a novel featuring said characters...it has to be something pretty engaging to hold my attention. Anything too complicated or serious (or "too broad and too deep for the TV screen") quickly loses my interest when it comes to this particular character pairing, so it's not particularly surprising that I soon lost interest in the NA series.

From the point of view of Doctor Who, it's fairly original, but as a horror-story there are a lot of familiar aspects. It's an isolated village threatened by a dark sentience that picks on people's nostalgia and fear. Everyone has something in their past that they're ashamed of or beholden to and whatever that is eventually destroys them in a grisly fashion. That's why there's so many characters set up, because they all need to be killed.

If this were a novel twice it's length, there might have been sufficient room to get under the skin of these characters, Stephen King style, but all we get are a few brief sketches and the ironic death.

All of the above reasons are exactly what I love about this novel. Stylishly and atmospherically it's a cross between traditional Doctor Who and Quatermass, very cosy and unoriginal perhaps, but it makes for easy reading. Easily the mpst traditional story in the NA range till this point (perhaps even in the whole range? - I haven't read enough of them to comment) A bit more time to get to know the charaters better wouldn't have gone amiss, though.

There could have been a lot of fun had with the Edmund Trevithick character meeting the Doctor. Edmund being the lead actor in Nightshade, a Quatermass-like show. They could have compared notes on defeating alien invasions. Yet their meeting is kept to a minimum....

I agree...it's a bit of a missed opportunity, isn't it?

Then there's the business with Doctor Who being an utter b@*tard and not letting Ace leave in 1968. He could have said that she would muck up her own timeline, or that he needed her for a greater purpose, or that perhaps the very shallow relationship she was forming with Robin Yeardon clearly wasn't going to go anywhere. Instead he petulantly tricks her into getting into the TARDIS, whisks her away to another planet and then hides in the bowels of the ship when Ace realises what he's done. The Doctor, by this point, is a character who can garner no sympathy from the reader whatsoever.

He's certainly heading that way, isn't he? However I found him much easier to read here than I did in some of the earlier novels in the series. However in subsequent novels he just got worse...

[Antony Cox]

I don't have a copy of this any more, but remember it quite well and really enjoyed it.

[MacNimon]

I don't have a copy of this any more, but remember it quite well and really enjoyed it.

So did I!

While it felt much more traditional than a typical 7th Doctor story, I think it was so enjoyable because the story was so obviously influenced by Quatermass as much as DW itself, being something of a hybrid of both.

Mark Gattiss gave it such an easy reading style as well, in fact I'd say that it's possibly the best Doctor Who story he's ever written...nothing else he's written since has ever quite matched up to this.

Despite its faults I still find this one of my favourite 7th Doctor novels, the only other that I'm equally fond of being Storm Warning. I'd give this a 9/10.

[Rob McCow]

It's very interesting - I found it to be very flawed in some ways, but I agree it was an easy and engaging read.

I just felt that there was a good Doctor Who story and a good horror story fighting for dominance, but there wasn't room for both. Another 100 pages or so could have made a big difference.

Reading the New Adventures at the time, I suppose everyone got used to the TARDIS not landing until page 70!

[Jon Masters]

This is what I wrote for the old EZ board books thread

This was the book which convinced me that the NA were going to be worth buying, that it was possible to produce great original DW stories in written form.

Re-reading it now makes me realise how unlike a DW story it really is, because it comes across as much more a Sapphire & Steel story. We never really find out much about the enemy - it remains the mysterious Sentience throughout, but the effects it has are pretty horrific for a DW story. There’s the great idea of using people’s fears to attract them (used lots of times subsequently and previously, but not, I think, in a DW context). The setting of an isolated community is not new, but is much larger than we’re used to. Best of all we get a complete set of characters - even those that don’t make it past the first quarter of the book are wll drawn people, rather than just monster fodder.

We also get some character development for the crew. You can believe that the Doctor is really on the point of retirement, and is very reluctant to be drawn into the plot. Meanwhile Ace is becoming more independent ( though not always in a good way). And for once they are not the stars - it’s Edmund Trevithick who the book is named after, and rightly so. The portrayal of someone at the end of their life is almost perfect, and although his sacrifice is signposted it still works really well.

My only complaint is with the two endings. First, I’m not keen on the time-travelling Sentience, and I’m not convinced the maths works either (if the star exploded 300 years ago, so it takes 300 years for the effects to reach Earth, then the sentience needs to travel back 600 years and then travel to the star at the speed of light so that it reaches it when it actually explodes). Secondly, the idea of the Doctor kidnapping Ace seems to have been tagged on to justify later stories, rather than being an obvious development in this one.

Otherwise, one of my favourite NAs just for the atmosphere.( And on p46 - is that a cameo by Royston Vasey’s infamous butcher ?)

One of the reasons I probably liked it so much was where it occurred in the NA run. While the Timewyrm set were good in parts, I found most of the Cats Cradle Trilogy unbearable, and certainly not what I thought Doctor Who was about. In contrast Nightshade was (a) a single confined story and (b) so much closer to TV DW that it was almost a relief to read it.

[Rob McCow]

Woop! With three days to go, we've got a good few comments!

In context, I agree, Nightshade might have seemed a return to form.

Next month I'm going to make you all read The Coming of The Terraphiles. Hah!