There is a joke in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy about two warring factions uniting to find the being that insulted
them, that being Arthur Dent. The
punchline being that the two factions of alien races are small, and Arthur
never even knows they’re after him. It
is that joke which feels like the inspiration for The King of Terror,
Keith Topping’s first solo novel, and third overall, and honestly, it might
just be why the book falls incredibly flat.
It’s premise is essentially a cliché, Adams only makes it work by
turning it into an absurdist joke. The
book starts out perfectly fine with the Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough finding
their way into a conspiracy involving UNIT and with UNIT comes Brigadier
Lethbridge-Stewart. This is a Brigadier
post-Battlefield as the book also takes place at the turn of the
millennium, something that several Past Doctor Adventures would do. It doesn’t take long for the conspiracy to
lead to California and that’s where the book slows down its pace to essentially
a drudge. The initial chapters are
promising, Topping displays the prose that made The Devil Goblins from
Neptune and The Hollow Men such enjoyable reads with the only
quibble being the characterization of the leads is a touch bland, but hey this
is a Fifth Doctor novel, so he tends to be on the bland side at times.
Tegan and Turlough have little to do in the opening
chapters and once the action moves to America, their characterization is thrown
off-kilter, Turlough especially taking the more annoying aspects of the
character and amplifying them to an extreme degree. He gets drunk and whines constantly
throughout the book, and there is a rather unfortunate subplot that is
unnecessarily dark for everyone involved.
The central aliens at the core of the book, the Jex and the Canavitchi,
could have been fun in a campy B-movie style plot, something that the cover of
the book actually looks like it’s going for, but Topping plays them straight as
being behind a grand conspiracy to bring their battle to Earth, creating as the
Brigadier says at one point a war in heaven.
Topping has some imagery feel like it’s meant to be referencing the
Eighth Doctor Adventures’ concept of the War in Heaven, but it isn’t explicit
and feels more like Topping attempting to be creative with the imagery in the
book. The pace of the book also is
actively working against it, instead of a mystery slowly revealing layers and
putting pieces together, the book is a slog to get through. Usually it only takes me a couple of days to
get through a book this size, but this one took me over a week and a half
simply because there wasn’t much motivation for me to continue. There is some effort in the book to make a
conspiracy at the American UNIT work and set up some things for a potential
sequel (a sequel that Topping would never write due to only penning one more
book), but this is a book which had an inkling of a good idea that wasn’t
capitalized on.
Overall, The King of Terror is a book which
should work on paper but does not in practice.
There are scant few moments when it does shine, and it is just a little
shorter than the other Past Doctor Adventures.
It is mainly let down by a plot that comes across as cliched, less than
standard Doctor Who fair, and characterization that either doesn’t seem
to understand why a character would work, or just keeping the bland aspects to
a character. There are a few good ideas,
but it’s one of the most skippable Past Doctor Adventures. 2/10.
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