siskoid 's review for:

Doctor Who: Longest Day by Michael Collier

1.0

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There have certainly been clunkers in the Eighth Doctor Adventures before, but Book 9, Michael Collier's Longest Day, is the first I actually dislike. No, not dislike - HATE. It blows a potentially intriguing planet that's subdivided into different temporal zones on very boring dual plots. The Doctor and Sam, once separated, have adventures that really don't have much to do with one another, though both are populated with characters that have alien-sounding names so that it takes 100 pages just to get them straight. The women, Sam included, are essentially there to be assaulted or called "bitch" (along with some nastier things). Oh, and eventually the aliens from one plot walk into the other to massacre everyone and make sure it was all very pointless. They're the bugs on the cover, a rare instance of the series actually showing you a scene from the book. The killing and the temporal effects are all in service of Collier's cod-Lovecraft or Clive Barker material, the type of body horror I always felt was the weakest trope of the preceding New Adventures. Technobabble resolution. And to add insult to injury, it can't easily be skipped, because it starts a little arc that sets up the next few books. So have I thrown the book out the window at any of the various points where the impulse took me, I would have been a little confused moving forward.