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Wednesday, December 15, 2021

The King of Terror by: Keith Topping

 

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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