Falls the Shadow
begins with the TARDIS being dragged down to Shadowfall, a huge Victorian
manor, and loses power while inside the house two pan dimensional beings called
Gabriel and Tanith who make themselves to be God as the owner of the house is
continuing the Master’s experiments with TOMTIT from The Time Monster. The horror
of the novel comes in with the warping of the house as rooms stretch and
rearrange themselves leading to paranoia and there is danger all over the
place. The entire story reads like a
gothic horror novel and those aspects of the story I honestly love as the
character drama is on top form. There is
a problem in that the story is way too long for its own good clocking in at 356
pages it just has one of the draggiest middle sections I’ve had to slog through
as the grotesque imagery has stopped and it’s a lot of technobabble. We don’t care how everything is working, we
will take it as it is and just move on to the plot.
The characters in the
novel were done really well. Starting
with the Doctor, here you get to see his anger when he realizes that the TARDIS
is dying and he needs to try and save it.
He lets out his fury and in his own right gets put through the
ringer. While O’Mahony barely explores
it there is a portion in the novel where the Doctor is trapped in another
universe and has no idea what is going to happen to his companions. He knows Ace and Benny will be alright, but
can they fix the problem without him.
While he is three steps ahead he doesn’t know how to execute his plans
throughout as he’s trapped. Moving right
along to Ace, you get some of the best Ace material for quite a while as she
reacts as best as she can when faced with her own fears. It has been several years, yet she is still
haunted by the events of Ghost Light
and is afraid of it happening again. Her
torture in the novel is very psychological as she becomes unsure of herself and
gets her mind toyed with throughout the story.
She ends up being the one to flat out murder Gabriel and Tanith, which
some fans may see as horrible, but I actually like the decision to make her be
the murderer. She has been toyed with
and Gabriel and Tanith have been extremely smug with her as they torture her
and it is sweet to get her revenge.
Benny is here and gets the physical torture as she goes through
hell. She gets roofied, falls into
vampire orchids which suck two pints of her blood and is forced to drink
blood. Heck her body even dies in total gruesome
glory and to see her get through it is great.
She still stays cynical and sarcastic even in the face of pain.
The supporting characters
are also great as everyone minus the villains are slightly broken. As it would get repetitive to go through them
all I’m going to go through some of the key players before getting to the
villains. First is Justin Cranleigh who
is pretty much a mental patient who can see all the crazy stuff happening in
the story even before the villains appear.
His fate is heartbreaking. Next is
Cranleigh’s lover Sandra who is blind, so she doesn’t care about her lover
Cranleigh’s deformities. Again just
wants to be happy but gets toyed with and suffers a horrific fate. Finally we have assassin Jane Page who has no
real name and has her own delusions of grandeur. She eventually falls to the villains and becomes
mad thinking she’s the king of England and her own redemption near the end.
Finally we get to the
villains. Gabriel and Tanith were created
basically immortal and are just plain insane.
They torture everyone in the house as they find it fun. Also they play themselves as the
stereotypical stuffy British couple which is just terrifying. They get there power as you cannot resist
their demands, so if they say to hurt yourself you hurt yourself. It becomes terrifying when it looks like they
will actually get out of the house and wreak havoc if they ever got out.
Problems with the story
are again the boring middle and honestly the prologue and the subplot with
Qxeleq really doesn’t go anywhere interesting except a jump scare in the middle
of the novel. There are also a lot of
continuity references that try to explain everything, yet it doesn’t need to, it
can show it and not tell it.
To summarize, Falls the Shadow has some great
character drama with some horrific imagery, but the problems with its length,
pacing and supporting characters stop it from being anything above
average. 60/100
No comments:
Post a Comment