Doctor Who and the Daemons by: Barry Letts

 

Doctor Who and the Daemons was written by Barry Letts, based on The Daemons by Guy Leopold (a pseudonym for Barry Letts and Robert Sloman).  It was the 8^th story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Barry Letts is a great producer and a writer with great ideas.  The Daemons, The Time Monster, The Green Death, and Planet of the Spiders are the four Jon Pertwee serials that he cowrote, albeit without credit due to being a producer, but there is a reason that Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke were responsible for novelizing three of those stories.  That reason is Doctor Who and the Daemons.  The Daemons on television is a fan favorite, one of only three serials to be five episodes long and playing out like a folk horror story at an isolated village against an alien demonic entity summoned by the Master.  Letts and Sloman craft a near perfect end to Jon Pertwee’s second season, so why does the novel not work?

 

Doctor Who and the Daemons as a novel follows the television serial beat for beat, and hey for a lot of novelizations that works.  Terrance Dicks is a master of doing a simple script translation to prose that at worst will create just a nice piece of fluff, examples of that include Doctor Who and the Time Warrior, Doctor Who and an Unearthly Child, and The Ambassadors of Death.  So why doesn’t that work for Letts?  Well, Barry Letts as an author has a tendency to underwrite scenes, providing almost too many descriptors and actions in a scene while maintaining this very simplistic style.  There are far too many sequences where the action is almost reported on without letting us get inside the characters’ heads or understanding the motivation.  This makes the novelization drag and feel closer to a script in prose form than an actual novel.  Compounding this is the length of the novelization at 172 pages, which while short for any of the other book ranges is quite long for the novelizations.  The audiobook release comes out to just under 6 hours, while other stories are generally 3-4 hours comfortably making this a more difficult listen due to the issues with prose.  Letts would only contribute one other novelization at the end of the range, The Paradise of Death, novelizing the radio play of the same name.  He would contribute to the Virgin Missing Adventures (with a novelization of The Ghosts of N-Space) and the Past Doctor Adventures (Deadly Reunion and Island of Death), but if Doctor Who and the Daemons is any indication he didn’t actually grow as a writer by the 1990s.

 

This isn’t to say Doctor Who and the Daemons is terrible.  The script it is adapting is still a cracking story, and whenever Letts attempts to capture Christopher Barry’s marvelous direction in the prose it is excellent.  He also does an excellent job with replicating the dynamic between the Third Doctor, Jo Grant, and as the book goes on the Master who form the centerpiece of the novel.  This means that it is not a massive problem with telling the story, just keeping its reader engaged throughout.  The side characters don’t always fare as well, with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart perhaps the most out of character, acting more like an incompetent leader instead of the strong character readers would know from the television series.

 

Overall, Doctor Who and the Daemons is sadly one you should skip if you have the VHS/DVD/Blu-ray release of the television story.  It’s let down by weak prose and poor characterization that makes the novel more difficult to get through while the plot itself is preserved rather nicely.  It’s not a bad book, but it becomes the definition of a middle of the road book.  5/10.