Eternity Weeps by: Jim Mortimore: Burning from the Inside Out

Eternity Weeps is not a Doctor Who novel.  Oh sure it’s got the Seventh Doctor and Chris Cwej featuring in it, but the Doctor is only in it for a cameo.  It is actually a backdoor pilot for the Bernice Summerfield series of novels to be published by Virgin after the Doctor Who license ran out in the middle of 1997.  You would think I would be a bit angry that this really has little to do with the Seventh Doctor’s continuing adventures but really I can’t.  Jim Mortimore, who himself had to go through tragedy of losing a loved one while writing this novel, writes a highly emotional and engaging thriller as a sort of Indiana Jones meets the apocalypse way.  The book is called Eternity Weeps on something Benny says in the latter half of the novel about the events thus far and it is fitting for the book.  The tone of this one is exceptionally bleak from the get go as the villains are just people with guns who are looking for power.  The plot starts with Benny and Jason getting into a lovers tiff that they won’t be recovering from as their marriage was doomed from the start.  Benny storms off to Earth in the year 2003 where she spends a few months looking for Noah’s Ark, yes that Noah’s Ark.  I think these are the weaker portions of the novel, they aren’t bad at all, but they are very weak as the pace is pretty slow.  Mortimore is just doing some character study for Benny and Jason together as a couple which is something that comes to fruition in the end of the novel when they decide to get a divorce.  It’s something that I cannot imagine happening with any other characters as they leave on an argument, but they understand each other’s differences, yet of course they won’t stay friends.

 

Benny could never really stay friends with Jason as she’s way too stubborn to forgive him and admit her own faults in this relationship.  She’s partially responsible for rushing into the marriage and part of the reason why it failed.  Sure Jason by all accounts is just an idiot who always seems to screw things up in some way or another which is a big theme when the real threat starts to rear its head.  This story does a world attacked by disease with Agent Yellow, an alien infection of the Earth that is from a root of sulfuric acid.  Because of the sulfuric acid component it burns people alive from the inside out done in many horrific ways especially considering the first victim that the novel shows under Agent Yellow, is Liz Shaw.  The novel kills off Liz Shaw making us realize just how high these stakes for the novel actually are.  Liz at this point has helped the Earth completely through working with the Earth Reptiles, finding cures for diseases and to see her shot down by this disease in an instant gives you a really good look at everything.  It’s really what keeps the novel up and the novel’s pace increases, but the slow start is the novel’s real downfall.  It turns out Agent Yellow is from a species from Venus who are using it in a play which breaks the tension of the novel, but allows Jason to have a moment of glory which allows the novel to sort of save itself from going the way of a really bad ending.

 

To summarize, Eternity Weeps is a story that shows just how dangerous aliens can really be to people on the Earth.  Agent Yellow and the human villains of the story is really what allows the tension to build through the very slow build up to a dramatic conclusion.  Mortimore does a great job with the body horror as people are shot, burned, and killed in increasingly brutal way as well as the characters whom he finds an extreme joy writing for.  The Doctor and Chris being largely absent from the novel is not a problem at all for the story as it really doesn’t need them while Benny is having too much fun in the protagonist’s role and the hero of the story.  85/100.