Daniel Blythe’s first
novel, The Dimension Riders, was a
novel that I didn’t really like as it was a rip off of the already existing
story Shada and what original
portions it had were really boring.
Today I’m looking at Blythe’s second novel which in all honesty doesn’t
fare any better than the first, in fact, I believe it is slightly worse than
the first. Infinite Requiem is a novel that is an original plotline for Blythe
as it doesn’t actually rip off any other established Doctor Who stories per
say. The plot starts off doing an homage
to Rosemary’s Baby except with the
devil being a psychic being and there not really being any horror
elements. These portions of the novel
are the most vivid in my mind for the reasons that the homages of the
Hinchcliffe/Holmes era stories worked in they had complex characters that
helped make everything feel more real.
These portions have some great characters. This is seen best with Nita and Tilusha. Tilusha is in the role of Rosemary in the
homage, but also is suffering from domestic abuse which her baby actually ends
for her, but that isn’t enough to save her life.
These portions of the
book eventually move to the far future where the Doctor and Benny meet up with
Cheynor from The Dimension Riders
where there are three super beings. Two
of them are trying to reunite themselves with each other while the other wants
to get rid of the corruption of one of them.
They are the three Sensopaths which are a great idea for villains with a
lot of potential. Kelzen and Shanstra
are the foils with Kelzen being rational and nearer to the good side of the
spectrum while Shanstra is the exact opposite, serving as our villain for the
story. The third Sensopath is Jirenal
who is the most forgettable of the three.
He is I guess the military man so to speak but is just really
forgettable. The final praise I can give
to this novel is the Doctor and Benny are the best parts about the plot. It almost feels like Blythe was trying to
reflect Sigmund Freud’s notion of the id, the ego and the superego, but none of
it really shows. The Doctor feels very
much like the Doctor. He has an interactive
hologram in the TARDIS and knows that the Zero Room can be instrumental in
saving the day. Benny is also very
entertaining in her actions of the novel.
Sadly the rest of the
novel is extremely boring and boarders on forgettable. I finished reading this about ten minutes
before writing this review and I’ve already forgotten a lot of the
characters. It’s one thing to be bad but
is almost worse to be forgettable. The
characters I actually do remember are very one note. Cheynor is an alright character I guess, but
he barely made an impression as it is. One
thing to note is that Blythe is comparing the characters to music, specifically
a requiem and music very similar to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera.
To summarize, Infinite Requiem, has great ideas for
itself to work as a story, but with an author like Daniel Blythe at the helm,
the thing really becomes some of the more forgettable Doctor Who. It acts like it wants to be an experience
like The Phantom of the Opera, but as
it is a sequel that nobody was asking for and one to a novel that nobody
thought was very good in the first place much like The Phantom of the Opera’s sequel Love Never Dies. 25/100.
No comments:
Post a Comment