The Shining is
the definition of a slow burn novel.
Stephen King’s third published novel is one of those stories which has
entered the public consciousness and been almost eclipsed by its 1980 film
adaptation directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Jack Nicholson. Almost every reader nowadays who picks up The
Shining is going to be at least subconsciously familiar with the story. Jack Torrance is a recovering alcoholic who
is given one last chance to clean up his act as the winter caretaker of the
Overlook Hotel, but the harsh winter and ghosts of the hotel slowly drive Jack
insane as he attempts to murder his wife, Wendy, and his son, Danny. The actual attempts to murder Wendy and Danny
only begin about two thirds of the way through the novel. The first two-thirds of the novel are
dedicated to character drama as the pressure between Wendy and Jack increases
and the sinister atmosphere builds before all hell literally and figuratively breaks
loose. The Overlook from the beginning
of the novel is a character in its own right, always looming over the
characters, always housing these dark shadows that suggest danger is right
around the corner. Danny has powers referred
to as ‘the shining’ which allows him to see flashes of the future, and the past
which gives the reader a sense of oncoming danger mixed with the right amount
of confusion. The Shining works
on building atmosphere, with the first out-and-out scare is a dead wasp’s nest
coming to life and stinging Danny, a scene that wouldn’t work on film, yet on
the page is quite frightening and works to tug at Jack and Wendy’s
relationship.
Jack Torrance of the novel is a flawed character. King introduces Jack as at the bottom of the
barrel with nowhere to go, but up; yet King somehow manages to make him slowly
lift up before crashing down through the hotel’s influence. Jack is haunted by his own past: beating a
student for slashing his tires in a fit of rage, breaking his own son’s arm while
drunk, his own father beating him and his mother as a child, his own struggles
with alcoholism, and the play that he just can’t seem to finish. He is a flawed character, but King makes it
so the reader does sympathize with him.
It’s easy to understand why Jack wants to see what the bloody history of
the Overlook has, why Jack is so tetchy at times, and why Jack is just under so
much strain. King makes it so the reader
wants to see Jack overcome his issues and make it through the winter, but the
reader knows deep down that this isn’t going to end well. The hotel takes Jack’s fantasies, mainly an
imaginary dialogue with a bartender, to begin to manifest and drive Jack
insane. Giving Jack a drink is the point
of no return for Jack, fully immersing himself in the clutches of the hotel and
able to do its bidding. It’s this point
where the pace of the novel increases in the final 100 pages as Jack goes on a
rampage, taking a roque mallet and attempting to bash his wife’s brains in and
give his son to the hotel.
Wendy is the innocent caught in the crossfire
throughout the novel, not being necessary for the hotel, yet King still devotes
large portions of the book to her point of view. Wendy has her own issues, mostly those of
reconciliation with her mother, throughout the novel, yet is the one to ground her
husband until Jack is taken over. She
could have easily become a cliched damsel in distress, but is constantly
assertive and fights back through the reasonable fear of her husband coming to
kill her. Some of the serious damage to
Jack is done by Wendy, stabbing a kitchen knife right into his back killing his
body. Yet, this doesn’t end the horror
while the hotel takes the opportunity to reanimate his corpse and continue the
onslaught. The horror of the novel only
ends with an explosion, destroying the Overlook. Overall, The Shining has so many
intricate threads exploring the three characters and events are much deeper
than any review I could write that would necessarily do the novel justice. It builds to a thrilling conclusion after a
delve into the deep history, psychological horror, and finally physical horror
for an excellent reading experience.
10/10.
There’s something amazing about getting to a throwback
to the days of the Virgin New Adventures in the midst of Past Doctor
Adventures. Robert Perry and Mike Tucker’s
Matrix, the second novel from this specific pair and works out the specific
kinks of their first novel Illegal Alien to form a perfect standout for
the Past Doctor Adventures range. The
plot of Matrix, like many of the Virgin New Adventures, forces the
Doctor off-screen for much of the runtime as a malignant force takes hold and
forces the Doctor to assume the role of Jack the Ripper about a third of the
way through and lose his memory, leaving Ace alone on the streets of an alternate
Victorian London, one where the Ripper rules.
Perry and Tucker craft a novel whose tone can only be described as dark
and twisted, as each setting is in a sort of alternate history where the Doctor’s
actions have changed everything forever.
Like many of the Virgin New Adventures, Ace is put through another crucible
as she is unwittingly put on her own and the Doctor once again has to realize
what it means to be the Doctor. As a
novel, some of the events perhaps breach territory even the darkest of the Virgin
New Adventures rarely reached.
Perry and Tucker open the novel in an alternate 1963,
one where Jack the Ripper became an immortal overlord and the Doctor and Susan
never came to London 1963. This first
segment of the novel, running the first two parts of the book’s six part
structure, is set in a typical dystopian alternate history setting, but Perry
and Tucker use it importantly as a way to raise the stakes. This is not in the sense that the entire
world is in danger, the UK itself is still there, but is the fifty-first state
of the United States of America due to the Ripper’s influence and while its citizens
are in turmoil, the actual world is all and all stable. No, the stakes here are raised because the
Doctor and Ace meet alternate versions of Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. Of course, in this timeline they never met
the Doctor and both became poverty stricken in an underpaid Coal Hill School. They are still recognizably the same characters
the Doctor and fans already know, but what Perry and Tucker do here is give the
audience the emotional connection for the stakes. The reader knows these characters and know how
the story is supposed to go for them and getting them back on track is put in
the back of the reader’s mind adding to the tension for the novel.
Once the plot moves to the alternate Victorian London,
much of the novel follows Ace as she attempts to survive the harrowing East
End. Ace spends much of the novel
undergoing various levels of assault and humiliation going from a boarding
house, to an estate as a servant, to a freak show, and finally to prison to be
tried to be hanged. This is also the
novel which turns Ace into a murderer, killing the elderly woman whom she works
for in self defense on the second day triggering a return of the Cheetah Virus
from Survival. Ace for the rest
of the novel then has to fight off animal instincts to keep her humanity
intact. This is what attracts Jacques
Malacroix, owner of a travelling freakshow with an entire international mafia
underneath his reign. Malacroix is a
character who uses manipulation, physical and emotional abuse, and just plain
torture to get his freaks to become codependent on him. Reading the sections of the novel in which he
appears is like reading a story of domestic abuse. All of the so-called freaks in his circus
shadow all too real examples of what these types of circuses and sideshows were
of the era, emulating Tod Browning’s often banned horror film Freaks. Ace being allowed to reunite with the Doctor
is also one of the most heartwarming sections of the novel as it makes it feel
like everything is going to be alright in the world. It is one of those sections where you feel
like maybe this will be solved.
The Doctor for the most part of the novel is off-page
and in his place is an amnesiac, Johnny.
Johnny is a character with the desire for intelligence of the Doctor,
but none of the cunning and none of the stone defenses. The character becomes one of vulnerability,
being attacked by several Londoners for his apparent unintelligence and vagrant
demeanor. Even the name Johnny, feels
somehow more childish and more of an unintelligent wanderer adding to the themes
Perry and Tucker work on. He is spit on
for being different, a major theme of these segments of the novel. He is taken in by rich Jew Joseph Liebermann,
an intelligent young man attempting to overcome the prejudice of the age. Liebermann has an extremely long life, living
well into the 1960s and eventually working at Coal Hill School. Liebermann is a fascinating character in that
he’s someone the Doctor eventually comes back to visit at different points in
his life. Liebermann is the only
character in the novel who shows some sense of humanity on the darkened streets
of London, and somehow manages to keep morale up throughout his entire life
being torn to pieces in front of him.
Finally, and this is a major spoiler, the actual villain of the piece is
the Valeyard, who has become Jack the Ripper and is intent on making the Doctor
become him. Perry and Tucker work up the
Valeyard as an insane murderer, yet somehow he is able to come with these
incredible plans. His presence is felt
throughout the novel, yet is still a large twist reveal near the end which is
perfectly foreshadowed. Overall, Robert
Perry and Mike Tucker’s Matrix deserves a place in your top 10 Past
Doctor Adventures and perhaps as one of th absolute best Doctor Who novels.
10/10.
It is a novel that reaches a
1,153-page count and it isn’t Stephen King’s longest novel. The novel itself is remembered for two major
scenes: the opening death of George Denbrough and the underage sewer gangbang
that occurs near the end of the novel. It
is a story with much more than that.
It is a story about the deep friendships, the strength of a
promise, human nature, and the cyclic nature of violence and trauma. The book has twice been adapted into a visual
form twice, the first a low budget TV-miniseries from 1990 starring Tim Curry
and the second a pair of big budget horror films directed by Andy Muschietti,
but neither can adapt all of the intricate subplots from the novel. The 1990 miniseries perhaps came the closest,
but in adapting the story for a television audience, much of King’s work was
toned down. The novel drips with
atmosphere and works in a way that only a book truly can.
It tells the story of a
group of seven from the town of Derry, Maine who as children are terrorized by a
creature only referred to as “It” and most commonly taking the form of
Pennywise the Dancing Clown. It wakes up
every 27 years to terrorize and feed upon the children of Derry, and the seven
members of the ‘Loser’s Club’ join together to stop it in 1958. They fail, and must return in 1985 to finish
the job. This rough summary does not
really do It justice. The novel
is much more than that simple plot outline due to a unique structure. King writes It in a way so that
technically everything takes place in 1985, but as the members of the Loser’s
Club remember the events of that summer in 1957, the reader learning about the
plot with the characters. This is a
style that cannot be replicated in any non-print form of media. This is also a risk for a horror novel taking
place in two time periods as the tension with the child characters as starting
in the then present immediately lets the reader know that all seven will make
it out alive. King does not derive
horror from the threat of death, however, horror is derived from the trauma the
characters are rediscovering through their memories. Each of the Losers have gone through extreme
trauma and now they are coming back to Derry to relive and overcome It.
The character of It can be read as a representation of
this type of trauma. It is an eternal
being and a part of the larger Stephen King universe (yes his books have a
shared universe). While adaptations
often put It front and center, It keeps It in the background. It is the looming threat that embodies the
fear of Derry, the fear of the Losers, and the general tone of the book. It is something otherworldly and eternal,
coming and going, taking glee in Its feeding.
Keeping the creature off-page with many glimpses and small
confrontations before the climax, allows King to ingrain It into the town of
Derry. It is Derry itself. Every adult and many of the children in the town
are subtly under Its influence throughout the novel, only being noticed when It
is awake and attempting to feed. While
Pennywise the Dancing Clown is perhaps the most famous and most often appearing
form of It, the novel still uses the Pennywise form sparingly so the horror of
the other forms slowly creeping into the scenario. It reflects the character’s deepest and
darkest fears from the childish fear of monsters and the adult fears of growing
up, dealing with prejudice and abuse.
There is a thread of children having to grow up as they deal with adult
issues and then return to deal with them later in life when they are adult
enough to overcome them. The cosmic
nature of It as a creature perfectly reflects the unconquerable nature of
trauma, prejudice, and even grief from the childish to the more adult nature of
these topics.
Each of the Losers in It has something to truly
overcome from the obvious to the more subtle.
Mike Hanlon and Stan Uris have to overcome the prejudice of racism. Mike is the only black child in Derry while
Stan is Jewish. At the start of the 1957
timeline, Stan was able to make friends and at least put away the racism put
against him and joke about it with his friends.
King however makes Stan the only member of the Losers’ to not overcome
his fear, slitting his wrists when he receives the call to come back to Derry. Mike is on the polar opposite, unable to hide
away his trauma. Mike is the lighthouse
keeper, the one to stay behind in Derry and to bring everyone back together. Mike was not allowed to forget. Unlike Stan, everyone knows Mike is black and
the Bowers gang without fail go after him for it. Psychopathic bully Henry Bowers poisons Mike’s
dog in an attempt to make Mike go insane.
It is this which brings Mike into the Losers Club, as the rest of the
Losers stick up for him by throwing rocks.
Beverly Marsh and Eddie Kaspbrak both have to deal with
abusive parents. Beverly’s father is
physically abusive, hitting her for not doing things correctly and potentially
spending time with boys. Alvin Marsh is
repressive and abusive, potentially being willing to kill his own daughter. Like Stan, Bev does have difficulty in overcoming
this, marrying an equally manipulative and abusive man who follows her back to
Derry. Bev also has a subtle subplot
about growing into her sexuality as she reaches puberty and becomes aware of
what that means. This is where we get to
the part of It that is just objectively bad, the underage gangbang. King was attempting to show the Losers coming
together and attempting to be an adult to save themselves, but this comes
across as more childish. It is also just
disturbing to read. Eddie Kaspbrak also
has difficulty in overcoming his mother, a woman with Munchausen syndrome by
proxy, convincing Eddie that he is a fragile boy. Eddie as a character is just boiling under
the surface through germaphobia and asthma, to rebel, and by the end of the
novel both as a child and adult he is able to.
Ben Hanscom also has a potential abuse story as his mother, being poor,
is determined to make sure Ben has enough to eat. This made Ben gain weight and be bullied by
Bowers for it (even having an H carved into his stomach with a switchblade
early on in the novel).
Richie Tozier perhaps has the weakest ‘trauma’
allegory throughout, being a more typical idea of being the class clown to hide
insecurities, yet he is one of my favorite characters in the novel. He’s the one who has the most typical story
and the provider of quite a bit of comic relief throughout the book. Rounding out the Losers is Bill Denbrough who’s
trauma is social ostracization for his stutter and the death of his younger
brother at the hand of It. The arc is
simple, yet effective. All the arcs are
effective. While It is the primary
antagonist, mention must be mentioned of the age old Stephen King trope of the
bullies. Henry Bowers is the main bully,
surviving to the 1985 storyline and making himself known as a complete
psychopath. King humanizes him, he comes
from an abusive father who influences him and there are implications that Bowers
is a deeply closeted homosexual. He goes
beyond simple high school bully and slowly degenerates into murderous
intent. His two main cronies are Vic
Criss and Belch Higgins and they are the more stereotypical bullies, yet are
still forces to be reckoned with.
While the above describes much of the main plot of It
there are still plenty of subplots and sidesteps, such as the interludes, the
character of Patrick Hockstetter (another bully and child murderer who is
killed by It), and the several other murders.
The attempt is not to spoil everything in the story, as the climax is
where much of the cosmic scale of It comes into play. It is not a perfect climax, but it does end
in an interesting way. It is not
a novel for everyone, and one that readers should take their time with. Let the horrors of Derry and the characters
really wash over you and if my review has piqued your interest pick it up. 9/10.
One issue new authors have when crafting a story is keeping
the pace of the story going. Now the
pacing of a story does not always have to be fast paced or slowly paced, but with
a novel there must be some consistency with its pace. This isn’t as much of a problem if the pace
starts slow and then speeds up, but whenever this happens in reverse, or worse
starts fast, slows down, and speeds up again, the integrity of the story doesn’t
hold up. That is one of the main issues
at the center of Trevor Baxendale’s debut Doctor Who novel, The Janus
Conjunction. The Janus
Conjunction starts off with a brisk pace as the Doctor and Sam arrive on
the planet Janus Prime where they are immediately attacked by giant cyborg
spiders, inaccurately called spidroids, and a large portion of the book is just
their fight for survival. There are two
rival military factions on Janus Prime, which will become a recurring theme in
Baxendale’s work, and the one in control of the spidroids is obviously the ‘evil’
of the groups. By the time Baxendale
begins to devote time to these factions The Janus Conjunction then
switches focus from quick paced action story, to a slower paced mystery to
unravel some anomalies on the planet, and finally into a quickly paced
conclusion in the last 20 pages or so of the novel. While the conclusion itself is for the most
part satisfying, it almost comes too quickly for the reader to process just how
everything has been done. The speedup
does seem to be out of style with the rest of the novel, and it leads me to speculate
if The Janus Conjunction wasn’t a victim of BBC Books’ harder limit on
page count and the conclusion was left behind in editing.
The actual conspiracy and mystery driving the plot of The
Janus Conjunction is a good example of fun Doctor Who, yet a style of
Doctor Who story that isn’t often done.
The grand conspiracy plot brings to mind a story in the style of The
Ambassadors of Death, though outside of atmosphere the plots are incredibly
different. The Doctor and Sam must keep
asking questions about what the conspiracy behind Janus Prime is. Janus Prime is a planet in a binary system
with one moon leaving the planet in a permanent total lunar eclipse. The planet is also soaked in a type of
radiation which starts mild: at first it leaves only some minor rashes, but it
eventually kills the skin and melts its victims. Baxendale has a way with describing the poor
victims of Janus’ radiation, and the bitterness it causes. Baxendale employs it as a looming threat over
the heroes throughout the novel as at any moment Sam and the Doctor could start
succumbing to the sickness. The ending
has Sam dead, which is perhaps Baxendale’s biggest mistake in The Janus
Conjunction: the novel has no consequences and most of it is undone by the
end which feels cheapened. This could
have been a decent exit for Sam, but she is spared.
The Doctor and Sam are also split for a good portion
of the novel’s length which Baxendale uses to muse on the Sam is Missing arc
for a bit, while the Doctor is on Janus Prime’s twin planet and trying to get
the action going and Sam is being defiant in the face of an authoritarian military. Gustav Zemler is the over the top villain of The
Janus Conjunction, and as a character Baxendale slowly lets him become
unhinged while the plot goes on around him.
Moslei, one of his underlings, is much more interesting and a source for
worldbuilding. Moslei fought in the
Cyber wars and there are several war style flashbacks which show the horrors
war has on a psyche and the actual threat the Cybermen and Cybermats can
be. Neither actually appear, but there’s
a goldmine for Baxendale to explore here and I wouldn’t be surprised if this
was meant to have the Cybermen in it at one point. The rest of the supporting cast, however isn’t
nearly as interesting. They all kind of
fit into stereotypes for action movies, which isn’t too bad considering this is
Baxendale’s first novel, but with another round of editing and maybe some
cutting down of one or two the supporting characters could have been
stronger. Finally, the Doctor himself
while great feels slightly out of development here, acting more like his TV
Movie persona than the development the past fifteen books have given
him. Overall, The Janus Conjunction
is a good entry in the Eighth Doctor Adventures and a great first effort from Trevor
Baxendale which perhaps needed one more draft and an extended page count to
find itself amongst the greats of Doctor Who books. 7/10.
Chris Boucher wrote three stories for Doctor Who
between Season 14 and 15: The Face of Evil, The Robots of Death, and Image
of the Fendahl. Outside of the show
he worked on Blake’s 7 as a script editor, but left his novels to be
novelized by the legendary Terrance Dicks in 1978 and 1979. It’s important to note that Boucher has not
written any prose work before the fifteenth BBC Past Doctor Adventures release,
Last Man Running. If one wasn’t
familiar with the three television stories from Boucher, Last Man Running
would be both one of the best and worst examples of his writing styles. Last Man Running is a novel that encapsulates
the atmosphere and science-fiction ideas from the television stories of
Boucher. The novel’s primary setting is
a mixture of a lush jungle and ancient spaceship straight out of The Face of
Evil, however, with the prose there are expansive descriptions to transport
the reader right into the alien landscape.
There’s also a third act twist about the actual ‘last man running’ that
feels reflective of The Face of Evil.
The surprise over the top villain is a reveal from The Robots of
Death with the deeper meanings being nowhere to be seen, but not to the detriment
of the character. Morley as he is named
here, brings some great chemistry to the novel right in the final third. His interactions with the Doctor and Leela
are excellent and one of the few real highlights of the novel. The atmosphere draws the most from the gothic
uncertainty of Image of the Fendahl, with the idea of some Lovecraftian
beast killing a society. The difference
here is in the setting that while Image of the Fendahl is preventing an
apocalypse, Last Man Running appears long after the world has ended.
The novel, however, is structurally weak. Writing for television and writing for prose
are two very different forms of writing.
Boucher is excellent when it comes to television which involves
cooperation with entire teams of cast and crew to bring a story to life as well
as having scripts edited by others. His
style of writing in Last Man Running is how you would describe a set and
the type of actors you would cast in characters. The two characters who Boucher captures in
prose are the Doctor and Leela, as Boucher is responsible for creating the
warrior of the Sevateem. The rest of the
characters are just names on a page, with defining characteristics ranging from
couple which secretly hates each other to here to build up a body count. The plot itself is incredibly an incredibly
standard Doctor Who story that could have been an excellent addition to the
Philip Hinchcliffe era of the show with some work. Putting Boucher on his own as an author with
only one editor looking over the script leads to a novel that reads almost like
a television script which just does not engage. It feels like something that needs to be
performed to be good, but as it stands it’s a subpar Doctor Who adventure. 3/10.
