The Hollow Men by: Keith Topping and Martin Day

The Hollow Men is a dark novel.  The image on the cover portrays a threatening scarecrow only previewing the horrors within.  The tone set by authors Keith Topping and Martin Day is very similar to The Wicker Man.  The setting of the novel is an isolated village, inhabited by Englishmen terrified of outsiders and who refuse to leave.  The opening chapters of the novel are a slow burn, the Doctor and Ace arrive in Hexen Bridge where if inhabitants leave they become infertile and there are mysterious goings on at the local church.   Scarecrows made from the recently deceased stalk the night and there is a mysterious black spot slowly growing in the center of the village.  Topping and Day’s actual plot of the novel really doesn’t extend too long, but in slowly revealing to the Doctor and Ace the history of Hexen Bridge and what exactly Jack of the Green is, the novel serves as an incredibly effective horror novel.  An effective plot device used here is that Ace and the Doctor are split up for the majority of the novel.  The Doctor gets kidnapped by Shanks, a gangster style character who is influenced into putting the chemical in the water supply to cure the infertility.  It’s actually causing the infertility and implied to potentially place the rest of England under the control of Jack of the Green.  In doing this, Topping and Day bring into sharp context how active in proceedings the Seventh Doctor is, even when he is not present.  This is a story where the Doctor doesn’t go in having a master plan, so to understand what exactly is going on with Hexen Bridge taking him out of Hexen Bridge handicaps his ability.  The Doctor has to have his wits at hand immediately to latch on any little clue.  Yes he had been monitoring the village since The Awakening, but that doesn’t mean he knew exactly what was going on and how to save the day in the end.



Ace’s plotline is perhaps the more interesting one of the two as it’s this plot which plays out like the traditional Hammer Horror film a la The Wicker Man or Blood on Satan’s Claw.  She is trapped in the village, accosted by a racist innkeeper who has a little sympathy for the outsider.  Themes of racism is one constant thread through Ace’s plotline.  This comes partially from the TV series where a Pakistani friend, Manisha, was killed by neo-Nazis which is a formative event in Ace’s character arc.  It’s what set her to burn down Gabriel Chase and give the Doctor reason to initiate the events of Ghost Light.  This time the Chen family, an Asian family new to Hexen Bridge, are the recipients of persecution for (as with any racist act) no reason.  It’s a great plotline as Ace forms a close friendship with Steven Chen building a party of survival once the scarecrows start attacking the village.  Topping and Day avoid the question of fitting Ace’s character into the development of the Virgin New Adventures, as they set this before Survival and after The Curse of Fenric.  Yet, The Hollow Men feels right at home with the Virgin New Adventures range.  The rotting corpses of villagers as scarecrows, an over the top human villain who is converted into the alien entity, and a true cosmic horror: Topping and Day pay tribute to the range of novels with aplomb.  Jack of the Green is a terrifying villain and like many of the great horror villains, it is kept off-screen for the majority of the novel allowing the reader to fill in the gaps.  There are these glimpses here and there, descriptions by the villagers who live in fear of the creature that remain on the vague, and when it is finally revealed like many of the best Virgin New Adventures, an element of the trip factor to make the alien nature of Jack of the Green feel just right.  The supporting characters are also great, especially Matthew Hatch, our villain who acts as the focal point, and Rebecca Baber.  Hatch’s insanity throughout the novel is underplayed, just teetering on the edge of letting it loose until the end where he physically goes through a looking glass.  Baber, like Jane Hampden in The Awakening, acts as a pseudo-companion in places and is excellent.  The only place where the novel is let down is that the ending is slightly rushed away from the slow horror to quick action set piece.  This does not mean that the ending is bad, it just causes quite a bit of tonal whiplash.  The Hollow Men feels like it would fit right at home with the Virgin New Adventures and once again proves that the early Past Doctor Adventures is a stronger range than the Eighth Doctor Adventures.  9/10.