Reviews

Doctor Who: Rags by Mick Lewis

nwhyte's review

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2.0

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2125391.html[return][return]This is a Third Doctor novel with some fairly gritty horror elements. It wasn't at all to my taste; the same author has also done a pretty violent Second Doctor novel, Combat Rock, where I felt it was just about justifiable given the colonial situation on which it was based. Here however I felt there was no such excuse; it's a story of a rock band taken over by an alien entity and spreading Evil around 1970s Britain (where, in a dystopian alternate universe, they have started showing Blankety Blank several years before it affected our time line), attempts at pastiche flopping miserably in several places and simply gratuitous. One of the rather few Who books I really wouldn't recommend to anyone.

hammard's review

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1.0

Mick Lewis managed to produce the only Doctor Who novel I have failed to finish, the incredibly offensive Combat Rock. This one I managed to finish but it manages to be even worse. The reason being that whilst Combat Rock tried and failed to be a violent satire on colonialism. This is just rehashing better stories.
70s Folk Horror - The Daemons
Exploration of Punk meeting UNIT (including a showdown at Stonehenge) - No Future
Attempts to be "adult" including random appearances of a female companion naked - most of the Virgin line.
On top of this none of the regulars feel right and everyone is meant to be acting out of character. People are just brutalised but as the end gets no follow-up we will never see any results. Also add on to that regular pieces of racism and misogyny in narration and it is really poor.

Maybe if you want a middling splatterpunk novel then this will be to your tastes, but as a Doctor who Novel for me it does not work at all.
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