‘Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters’ – Terrance Dicks (Target)

 


Page Count: 125 Pages

The Doctor and Jo Grant land on a cargo ship crossing the Indian Ocean in the year 1926, or so they think…

Far away on the planet Inter Minor, a travelling showman is setting up his live peepshow, watched by an eager audience of spaceport officials…

On board the ship, a giant hand suddenly appears, grabs the TARDIS and withdraws. Without warning, a prehistoric monster rises from the sea to attack…

What is happening? Where are they? Only the Doctor realizes, with horror, that they might be trapped…

‘The Carnival of Monsters’ was a Target novelization that I was given way back in the day, probably as a birthday or Christmas present, and it stayed on my shelves for years (along with all my other Doctor Who books) until I hit a spot of financial bother and had to sell it. I needed the money but really came to regret selling a favourite book of mine, especially when I tried to buy a replacement (damn…)

Well, I was headed home the other day and stopped in Marchpane Books, just on the off-chance that they had ‘Doctor Who’ books to pore over. Of course they did and amongst those books was an affordable copy of ‘Carnival of Monsters’. I made sure it came home with me and last night, I settled down for a read.

‘The Carnival of Monsters’ is one of my favourite ‘Third Doctor’ stories, in no small part because I read this book as a much younger Graeme :o) Dicks really captures the essence of this tale, a mystery that slowly unfolds for all of us at the same time (characters and readers) and becomes something far larger, threatening the stability of several biomes and an actual planet. There is a lot going on here and just when you think something has been resolved, something else sets things back and we’re on the go again.

And it’s all credit to Dicks here how he handles the situation of the crew of the SS Bernice being caught in a temporal loop and replaying events almost exactly. To be fair, he is going by the script, so half the job is done for him, but on the page it could get boring and repetitive very quickly, it doesn’t though.

And then we have the ‘stars’ of the piece, the Drashigs, vicious (and hungry) monsters that are like the Terminator in that once they have your scent, they absolutely will not stop until they’ve eaten you. They have no motivation, other than to eat, but once they debut, the Drashigs drive the plot superbly and make for an excellent finale.

I’ll quite happily admit to coming to ‘Carnival of Monsters’ with a little bias (I love this book) but after a couple of days struggling with my reading. I really needed a book that I’d enjoy and this one continues to give me just that. Well played ‘Carnival of Monsters’, well played :o)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

‘Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth’ (1992)

Image
Every time Halloween comes round, I promise myself that I’ll watch more horror films and read more horror fiction; we’re halfway through the month and you can see how that’s going so far… There’s still plenty of October left though so lets see how I do from now until the end of the month ;o) First up is ‘Hellraiser 3’ which I watched last night, mostly because I love it (you can tell how this post is going to go, sorry…) but also because it was cheap on Prime and I’m still just on the wrong side of payday. Here goes… TV reporter Joey Summerskill’s life is changed forever when she witnesses the horrific death of a teenager, torn apart by bloody chains. Joey’s search for a story leads her to the Lament Configuration Box but it has already been opened, waking an old evil from its slumber… Now Pinhead walks the earth once more, creating a new army of Cenobites from the transmuted flesh of his victims; his one desire to reclaim the Box. Even with help from an unexpected source, Joey Summers...
Read more

'Conan the Barbarian: Battle of the Black Stone’ – Zub, Scharf, Canola (Titan Comics, Heroic Signatures)

Image
It’s starting to look like this could be the week where I make a half decent dent in my ‘Comics TBR Pile’, lets see how we do... I’ve really been struggling with the ‘Savage Sword of Conan’ collection just recently (more than one reason but I want to finish the collection first before I talk about it) and I thought that I’d have to take a little step back from ‘Conan’ comics and come back when I was in a better mood for it. Until I realized that there was another ‘Conan’ comic lurking in the TBR pile and maybe I could give that a go instead. So that’s what I did. I’ve caught little glimpses of the ‘Black Stone’ storyline, in other ‘Conan’ comics, but I can’t help but feel that the event has kind of passed me by a little. That’s on me though to be fair, I’ve got the attention span of a goldfish right now and there are so many books that I just haven’t been able to focus on; I suspect a couple of them talk about a Black Stone… Oh well, I’m here now. Where better a place to catch up on ‘B...
Read more

‘The Pan Book of Horror Stories’ – Herbert Van Thal (Pan Macmillan)

Image
I was going to say that original posting will resume tomorrow but the way things are right now, probably safer not to promise anything ;o) In the meantime... I found this old review last night (originally posted Here ) and it feels like it fits in with what this blog is all about right now so, I thought I'd give it another shot here. I’m pretty sure this wouldn’t be the case today but when I was a child at primary school, the shelves were covered with books that I’m sure a teacher today wouldn’t let an eight or nine year old anywhere near. Maybe it was just my school, I don’t know, but I’m not complaining though; I had a lot of fun trawling my way through some great reads. This time round, I’m talking specifically about the ‘Pan’ and ‘Fontana’ horror series; books with the most lurid covers and stories to match inside. I only had myself to blame but at least three quarters of the nightmares that I had as a child came from reading these books and staring at covers festooned with rot...
Read more