'Doctor Who And The Image Of The Fendahl' - Terrance Dicks (Target)

Well... In an ideal world, today should have seen a post for 'The God is Not Willing' but this is not an ideal world and I still have another 68 pages to go before I'm done. I absolutely do not regret falling asleep in my chair, last night, though; it was clearly what was needed ;o)

Where does that leave the blog though? Well, I've also been dipping in and out of 'The Image of the Fendahl' target novelisation and figured another 'recycled review post' would sit nicely here today. If you want, you can read the full, original, review over Here but you won't be missing much if you don't. The key bits are all here in a 'blink and you'll miss it' short post. In my defence, 'Image of the Fendahl' is a very short read and doesn't have a lot of meat to it. I'd say the book is still worth a look though...

A sonic time scan draws the TARDIS to the Fetch Priory on Earth. There, the Doctor and Leela discover an impossibly old human skull that is the key to a nightmare from the Time Lords’ past.
A murderous monster stalks the priory grounds; and within, someone is intent on unleashing a malevolent creature that feeds on death itself...

If 'The Curse of Fenric' was the story that scared me as a teenager then 'The Image of the Fendahl' is very much the book that scared the life out of me as a child. The opening scenes, which cut between an experiment that takes an unexpected turn and the resulting death of a hitch hiker build up tension very nicely to a well placed climactic scene which pushes you headlong into the rest of the plot.

'The Image of the Fendahl' is another Doctor Who story simply told and very formulaic. You certainly get what you pay for here (in this case, a penny via Amazon New and Used…) Making up for this though is a really dark undertone of horror that props the story up. When even the Doctor is scared of the Fendhal you know that they are an enemy who will take some defeating. And you really feel the rising terror in the characters when they find their legs refusing to move as the Fendhaleen bears down on them… It's moments like this that make the story worth reading and I wouldn't mind tracking down the DVD to see how the story comes across on screen. 'The Image of the Fendhal' is a simple tale but also a dark one that taps into Doctor Who in a way that I don't normally find with the TV show. Are all Fourth Doctor stories like this (I seem to remember reading a few like this as a kid)?

I'm not sure I'll be in a mad hurry to re-read 'The Image of the Fendahl' (nostalgia will only take you so far after all) but it was fun while it lasted and still had the capacity to make the hairs on my arms stand up. Can't ask for a lot more than that really.