Bryan Simcott
At last the Eighth Doctor and co (Anji and Fitz) have gelled together.
This is the first time since Sam left that the Eighth Doctor has been so close to a TV-style four part story than ever.
The cast are realistic, the plot complicated within an easy to understand structure, and the writing style is easy to read. Twists and turns tie up the story into distinct sections. Once you start to get a handle on what's going on, it changes.
The last two chapters read like a breathless frenetic dash for the bus. Feeling out of breath, you finally realise that those little bits of fluff that seemed odd but inconsequential at the time of reading now come into their own.
You'll never look at a Grandfather clock in the same way again.
Dark, scary and brilliant.
Andy
This had all the right elements of campy-gothic horror, and the tension builds right up to the end.
Cracking, keep it up.
Iain Alexander
This is yet another of the recent Doctor Who books where the Doctor stumbles around getting into trouble.
This was along similar lines to many recent books, featuring a world perpetually at war, where it's always midnight, and always winter. There was no clear explanation for this. Dramatic license, I suppose, as it's not possible apparently to be bleak, harsh and unremittingly depressing in warm weather.
The scenario is fairly standard stuff. The Doctor stumbles through this war zone until he finds the research centre where one side is trying to develop time travel, so that they can finally cause the war to have never happened. Some additional seasoning is thrown into the mix by a race of extradimensional clock people who take over human beings by giving them the ability to change their personal history.
The Doctor falls prey to their blandishments, but in the denouement undoes his transformation into a nice Timex, by performing an act completely out of character.
I won't even go into the anti-1980s morality play which is one of the subplots.
I was distinctly unimpressed with this book. My main complaint about it, and the many others very like much like it is that they are self indulgent to a ridiculous degree.
This group of authors see the Doctor rather like an action man, a model through which they can express their own political or ideological convictions. This moralising is starting to be offensive, and it makes for poor science fiction.
It's also so unremittingly serious! The Doctor always was a bit tongue in cheek, there was always some humour there.
Lucien Barnes
I didn't like Anathingy anwhere near as much as Festival of Death. It was well written, and the premise of a time war was intriguing, but then it plunged all too quickly into a tale of B-grade characters regretting their pasts.
The whole middle of the book was thumb-twiddling stuff involving a chase through a research base, evil monsters and other such stuff. Read it so many times before. Probably not written this well, but still, kinda familiar.
Then the last third just made my jaw drop. When they leave the base, it gets gripping. Wow. The city where time has collapsed is just astonishing - it's like Castrovalva, but even cooler. It's just not in the book enough.
This is what really annoyed me. Morris is such a talented writer, and he spent most of the book doing something that people have done before. When he gets onto the really, really fascinating stuff... there's not much book left, and it runs out. Grrr.
Andrew Perry
The best Doctor Who novel in months.
The plot was fast moving and easy to follow. It was the only Doctor Who book I have ever read that made me sweat. It was one of those books that you want to put down but can't.
Who is the mysterious character who appears at the end of the book to gloat over the Doctor? Sabbath perhaps?
Tyler Huntington
I hadn't read an Eighth Doctor adventure previous to this since Father Time, so some of this story went very high over my head, but this book truly captured the elements of classic, horrifying Doctor Who.
The mysterious clock-creatures sent a shiver down my spine throughout the novel and I honestly could not put the book down.
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