Review: New Doctor Who Books

There's four new Doctor Who titles on the pile to review, so here goes!

First up are two new novels in the BBC's hardbacked fiction range. At this time these focus on whoever the current Doctor is, and so these two have Ncuti Gatwa's 15th Doctor as the lead, and while Spectral Scream features Belinda Chandra as the companion, the other, Fear Death By Water has no companion.

Spectral Scream first and I really enjoyed this tale by Hannah Fergesen set mid-way through Gatwa's second season, and sort of slotted in as another adventure following 'Lux'.

The Doctor and Belinda arrive on a planet, Sooz, where an eternal dance party is taking place. The Doctor gets his Vindicator reading, and Belinda notes someone looking remarkably like Mrs Flood, her next door neighbour, watching him. However things start to go awry when a psychic 'scream' echoes around, sending the time travellers off to investigate.

They arrive on planet Stenlar One Zero Six Five lower-case f, which is supposed to be uninhabited but which hosts a multitude of vegetation and fungi ... and some humanoids who have become symbiotic with the fungus. It's all very imaginative, and the plot continues to twist and turn as to what is going on, what the 'scream' is, and how the Doctor needs to untangle it all.

I could believe in the Doctor and Belinda, and the other characters are also well drawn. The plot has a lot of event crammed in, and I liked the movement of the characters throughout the story. A good, engaging read!

Onto Fear Death By Water by Emily Cook, and sadly it's not a patch on Spectral Scream. It reads more like one of the other series of books that Penguin are publishing, Icons, where the Doctor meets various 'famous' characters from history. Here it's Grace Darling, whose work rescuing ships and sailors initiated the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. The Doctor is inexplicably visiting a museum devoted to the RNLI in 2000 and meets a young Emily. He then realises that a barometer belonging to Grace Darling is emitting Artron energy and so goes back in time to explore.

It transpires that some creature is inhabiting the seas and that it has an affinity with Grace, and so the Doctor is able to help some aliens as well as the creature and Grace, and all ends happily ever after. Except that Grace still dies in 1842 from TB aged only 26. It's a tale of ships and windswept seas, and I'm not sure what relevance the title has as no-one seems to actually fear death by water, although Grace alludes to it on one occasion.

I found it all rather simplistic, with a straightforward plot, and a 'the Doctor meets ...' premise which rather weighs down the Icons series as well. Lovely cover though!

Both of these books are also available on Audio. Spectral Scream is read by Michelle Asante while Susan Twist tackles Fear Death By Water.

The third fiction title is Doctor Who: Frankenstein and the Patchwork Man by Jack Heath, and this is in a third series of titles that Puffin are publishing, and these riff on older, well known works of literature, and include the Doctor in the action somewhere along the way. They are not copies of the source material, but new stories which take characters and leads from them, but go off in their own direction.

The source here is Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, and I think everyone probably knows the basic plot if not from the book, but from the myriad adaptations and expansions that there have been over the years.

Here we have the ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and Rose (Billie Piper) in an adventure on Earth involving a strange stitched together creation powered by something called Voltigrades. There's Vincent Frankenstein who is trying to bring life back to deceased matter, and a plot that just whisks you along at a madcap pace. 

I think of the three fiction titles reviewed here, this was my favourite. Heath manages to cram a lot into the book, and it's scary and horrifying as well as surprising and action packed. Everyone gets something to do, and the solutions don't come easily. In many ways the novel, despite being published by Puffin (a children's imprint), is more grown up than the novels published under the BBC imprint.

A good tale which recreates well the exhausting helter-skelter of the ninth Doctor's TV season.

The final book is another tome of puzzles, The Official Doctor Who Puzzle Book by Dr Simon Fox. It's basically a book of code-type puzzles, but there are several different types. Finding the connection between four words; putting names and phrases back together again; putting clues together to find the final entry; mathematical calculations using clues to the numbers ... a lot of mind-bending fun basically.