Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood by: Terrance Dicks: The Awakening of the Ogri

Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood was written by Terrance Dicks based on The Stones of Blood by David Fisher.  It was the 55^th story novelized by Target Books.

 

The most interesting aspect of novelizing a story that is already pretty dark by the standards of what Doctor Who stories were doing at the time in terms of violence and gore.  The Stones of Blood, as a television story, already shows quite a bit of blood being poured onto the stones, but it would only be shown for a few seconds to allow the intended effect to take hold before getting back to the story.  Terrance Dicks however decides to use Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood, unlike many of his Doctor Who television stories, as a way to add to the more horrific elements of the series.  His descriptions of the blood being poured on the Ogri would be spine chilling for a child and are realistic for an adult.  It’s done in a pretty graphic way for a children’s book and keeps very much in line with the original script of the story.  The actual story itself, outside of Terrance Dicks’ usual stunning prose to guide us through a story, is a screen to page, word for word adaptation going off the original edits of the story with an extended death scene for De Vries which was cut for its graphic content.  One complaint I had with Dicks’ adaptation was how he made the second half of the story just drag on which might be because he doesn’t have Tom Baker’s expressive acting to draw from.  The cliffhanger for Part One as written in prose works much better than it does in the visual episode.  Dicks takes the cliffhanger from Romana’s perspective which allows us to get into her head and actually believe it is the Doctor who is trying to throw her off a cliff.

 

To summarize, Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood is a novelization that takes the best elements of the story and improves on it.  The biggest problem with the story is that the second half has a lot of pacing issues, but if you can deal with that you’re in for a pretty fun exploration of a story that is sure to chill the blood.  90/100