Reviews tagging 'Violence'

Doctor Who: The Stealers of Dreams by Steve Lyons

1 review

milkfran's review

fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot

2.75

Sometimes you wanna read something highbrow and sometimes you just want a huge dollop of nostalgia… 

As far as Doctor Who novels go this is one of the better ones, borrowing heavily from Ninteen Eighty Four. 

The dystopian setting is white ambitious for a Doctor Who novel and it does get somewhat dark at times: dealing with madness, the human capacity to dream and the very nature of reality itself.

Firstly, the strengths: Steve Lyons has the characters down to a tee and Rose and the Ninth Doctor leap off the page. (Apparently this is set inbetween episode 11, Boomtown, and episode 12, Bad Wolf. 

Lines like

 “Rose had eyes for only that, had thoughts for only the Doctor.” -p.127 

leads me to the conclusion that they were definitely fucking…)

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the secondary characters of Inspector Waller and Domnic, who felt wooden and 2D.

The hopeful note of the ending sounded slightly hollow because I have to be honest and say I didn’t really care all that much about the fate of either of them

. If this was a script for a TV episode I think a couple of decent actors would have rescued them and fleshed them out a bit: in fact, I think the whole novel would have worked better as an episode.

It’s also worth nothing that although the resolution/plot-twist with the Left brain eating micro-organisms initially seemed like a rip off of the nanogenes in the plot of The Empty Child/ The Doctor Dances but the author’s note at the end explains that the novel was written before Steven Moffat’s episodes originally aired.

Nevertheless, it’s only 137 pages long and for a pdf you can borrow for free from archive.org it’s a fun way to indulge the inner Doctor Who obsessed eight year old that lives in all of us. 
In fact, I’d have loved this as a child which is why I hesitated so much on the 2.75 ⭐️ rating. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Mental illness and Medical trauma

Moderate: Violence