Ghost Light

Book Review by David Lawrence

Forget Remembrance of the Daleks, this novel is definitely the best Doctor Who book ever written! Absolutely brilliant stuff.

I always found Marc Platt's script to be the most complex Doctor Who story written since Robert Holmes' The Talons of Weng-Chiang, no, even more complex than that! Certainly the most intelligent, even if none of us did understand it. Being one of the many who were completely bewildered the first time I saw it (due to trying too hard to understand it as I'd heard how incomprehensible it was) the book was a sheer delight - every little detail is cleared up and Marc Platt turns out a brilliant little book... all right, so I tell a lie, it's 160 pages (but then the first episode takes up 80 pages!) long. Some of the characterisations particularly that of Redvers Fenn-Cooper, are brilliant.

I also like Light's little exploration of Perivale when he comes to terms with where he is - "This is Earth, and it has seen its last day". The best-ever-pun-in-a-Doctor Who-novelisation award has to go to the title of Chapter Six - "Ace's Adventures Underground" - this brilliant companion seems to be an amalgam of all the famous storybook characters such as Alice and Dorothy. It won't be in NZ for a while yet, but it'll certainly be worth the wait.