FULL Doctor Who: Wolfsbane by Jacqueline Rayner reader original djvu via free

Book description

Book description
Im not normally a fan of taking horror or fantasy concepts and then dressing them up in vaguely SF terms so that you can use them in your books about spaceships and time travel (ooh, hes not a werewolf, hes an alien that has nanite imprintations of the local fauna!) but I will say that one thing Doctor Who has done well over the years is take those classic horror elements and subverted them until they become distinctly of Doctor Who. Most of this was accomplished during the Tom Baker reign, with successes (Pyramids of Mars) and some, er, interesting attempts (State of Decay, which as the first episode I ever watched, scared the crap out of me and almost made me never watch the show again . . . now Id probably find it silly), all given a blend of SF and horror that gave the show a unique feel.However, theres subversion and theres just outright using werewolves, which is the tactic this novel uses. And Im not sure thats a really good idea. Especially with the presentation given here.Rayners written one Who novel that I read already, Earthworld, that had its moments but was redeemed by a gut-wrenching coda, but here without the emotional hook of Anjis recent grief she seems a bit lost at times in how to center this. To some extent it seems like she was handed a jumble of concepts and told Make something out of this . . . considering how complicated she attempts to make it I do give her credit that any of it is at all coherent but it seems mostly to hover in its own momentum, only proceeding because fictional inertia makes it possible.What gives? Theres problems from the onset, where Harry Sullivan is stranded outside the TARDIS because . . . people forget? So the Doctor leaves without him and by the time he manages to finagle the TARDIS back to the start, it turns out that Harry is dead and buried, apparently killed by a werewolf, along with a whole bunch of other people. From there the story shifts back and forth in time, with the Fourth Doctors and Sarah Janes investigations paralleling Harrys own travails as he not only encounters possible werewolves but a mysterious man in velvety clothing who has a big blue box that definitely isnt bigger on the inside than out.Yup, its the Eighth Doctor (something I missed right away because I didnt read the back cover that closely) in the midst of his Do I know who I am? period, tantalizing Harry with the possibility that this guy who calls himself the Doctor may indeed be another version of THE Doctor, but . . . nah. Honestly, I first thought it was meant to hint at a future incarnation (shades of Battlefield) and only reading other reviews and actually looking at the back cover copy did I realize. Which isnt a good thing, since for the most part the Doctor comes across as rather bland, only occasionally showing flashes of himself and often kept at a distance. In fact, this could go for both Doctors, in that the Fourth Doctor seems unnecessarily subdued. To me he should be a booming presence, indulging in getting attention while performing slight of hand, dazzling and confusing in equal measure. Here it seems more perfunctory, like he knows that he cant do anything to affect the plot so keeps going through his paces until the book is over.The whole novel feels like that, honestly. The split nature of the plot is intriguing at first, especially when we dont know what the heck has happened, but none of the secondary characters are very compelling, and dont get anymore revelatory when they appear in later guises. So Harry sees them, and we see them later and then have to wait until the book tells us how they got from there to there. Which means that Sarah Jane and the Doctor go in circles most of the time waiting for Harrys plot to do something so it can be revealed. Which means the Doctor gets to drive cool cars and rescue werewolves while Sarah Jane gets hungry, tired and cold, digging up graves and freezing and being generally miserable, which doesnt make her feel like an integral part of the plot so much as giving the lady something to do.Ultimately, its not just the werewolves that become problematic. The core of the problem seems to be an angry earth and winds up not just involving the wolf-people but Arthurian legend and dryads, among others and unfortunately comes across as an awkward attempt to fuse the magical strangeness that works so well in the Eighth Doctor stories with the horror that often informed Tom Bakers tenure. However, its a bad match as this kind of dimensional mythological weirdness doesnt work for his Doctor and its telling that hes kept far away from it as possible, not really having to talk to, say, the dryads. Which means that the story wants to give us both concrete and vague explanations at the same time, instead giving us an ending that feels like a whole bunch of ideas for an ending without really resolving anything. There seems to be no sense of urgency or drama at times, once it becomes clear that Harry isnt really dead, its a matter of waiting for the Fourth Doctor to come in and tidy up, meaning all the time twisty complications dont add up to a whole lot (unlike, as others have noted, the Fourth Doctor novel Festival of Death, which takes the temporal choppiness and makes it work).As a solo vehicle for Harry Sullivan, it works just fine and he acquits himself well. It probably would have warmed dear Ian Marters heart were he still with us. Theres no embarrassing missteps, but it hangs together too loosely, so much that you can see the strings holding it together. It doesnt work as a pure Eighth Doctor nor a Fourth Doctor adventure and the hoped for amalgam of the two eras winds up being somewhat less than the sum of itself, alas.
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FULL Doctor Who: Wolfsbane by Jacqueline Rayner reader original djvu via free

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