James Goss

A Doctor Who novel from the Fourth Doctor himself! (Well, with a little help from James Goss, apparently. Which is a good choice. He's definitely one of the best writers doing DW tie-ins these days.) Apparently this began life way back when Baker was filming the show, when he and Ian Marter, who played companion Harry Sullivan, started kicking around their own ideas for a script. Eventually he worked up a very rough version of a screenplay, which was considered for a movie version, but, of show more course, never actually made.

I am glad we finally got to see a version of it, though, because it's very enjoyable in novel form. The first half really feels like it would fit perfectly into that era of the show, with pitch-perfect characterization and just the right blend of scariness, silliness, and humor. I found it utterly delightful. The second half takes kind of an unexpected turn and gets downright surreal, which didn't work for me quite as well as the first part, but it was still imaginative and interesting, and entertaining in its own completely bonkers way.

I do recommend it for fans of Classic Who. show less

I think this is the book that Dave Eggers wanted to write when he started The Circle (though, to his credit, I think it would have come together better at the end). It's an interesting premise: Dave is a serial killer, who takes orders from a mysterious cabal (via MySpace chats) to pick off the most annoying people on the internet. You know that girl who's always making drama and Instagramming her lunch? He'll put an end to that, right quick.

I'm on the fence about it, honestly. There's wry show more discussion of all the worst people you meet on the web, from Nigerian scammers to the people who post incendiary stories/columns simply because hatred fuels pageviews, and Internet Points are the end-all, be-all. But for satire, it feels a little on the nose. It gets better when he branches out from the straight murdering into more creative punishments/correctives, but there's still a dark stain that spreads across every page detailing his thought processes and justifications.

It's essentially trying to take the language of the internet (LOLs when no one's laughing, death threats simply for having differing opinions [or two X chromosomes, in some cases]) and manifesting it. I'm successfully convinced the internet is a cesspool, but then I already thought that anyway. I would think it better that such hatred is confined to the laptop and the cell phone. We'd all much prefer it didn't exist, but isn't anonymous vitriol preferable to physical violence?

I think my biggest reservation comes from the fact that the whole thing starts because Dave's afraid he's going to be embarrassed on the internet. For all his vigilantism (and it's clear, by the end of the book, that's at very worst supposed to be an antihero, if not downright heroic), he's motivated by exactly the same forces that, in others, antagonize him: The power of popularity, the leadership by likes. Maybe it's a literary argument that he's a product of the internet, but it certainly seems odd for the problem to be the solution. show less

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-fourteenth-doctor-novelisations-the-star-bea....

It’s no secret that I rate James Goss as one of the best Doctor Who writers currently in business (eg here, here and here), so I awaited his novelisation of The Giggle with eager anticipation.

I have to say that my high expectations were more than exceeded. Goss tells the story from the perspective of the Toymaker (first-person Doctor Who books are very rare and not always successful), smooths off the show more edges, throws in some extra pinches of emotion and also some shifts of genre and format – at one point the book becomes a choose-your-own-adventure for Donna, and there are other puzzles throughout. I suspect that the paper version will be even nicer and it’s the only one of the three that I plan to get in hard copy. It’s a real tour de force. show less

Scratchman is not a standard Doctor Who novel. It’s something stranger and more personal: a pair of Doctor Who stories filtered through Tom Baker’s own voice, memory, and late-life perspective on what it meant to be the Fourth Doctor.

If you love or miss the Fourth Doctor, the audiobook is essential. This is Tom Baker at his best — playful, melancholy, self-aware, and deeply inside the character. You don’t just hear the Doctor; you hear Baker’s understanding of him: the loneliness, show more the bravado, the tenderness for his companions, and the quiet knowledge that the universe does not always let you arrive in time.

Structurally, the book is really two linked stories.
The first, about the living scarecrows, is the stronger and more coherent piece. It’s folk-horror Doctor Who — concrete, cruel, and emotionally unsettling. The idea that people can be hollowed out and left standing in the fields in the shape of themselves is genuinely disturbing, and it carries a powerful sense of grief and loss.

The second story begins when Sarah Jane and Harry are pulled into the underworld, and the Doctor follows them. This section feels less like a monster story and more like a meditation on aging, fame, and what it means when the role that defined you no longer does. It’s funny, thoughtful, and full of Baker’s voice, but it doesn’t quite belong to the same novel as the scarecrow horror that came before it.

As Doctor Who, Scratchman shows the usual franchise seams. There are narrative gaps, improbable escapes, and moments where companions are saved again and again when logic says they shouldn’t be. These are not flaws so much as genre DNA — this is Doctor Who, not hard science fiction — but readers who care about strict internal logic will notice them.

What makes Scratchman work isn’t its plotting. It’s the intimacy. This feels like Tom Baker finally sitting down with the Fourth Doctor and saying, quietly, “This is who you really were to me.”

It’s uneven. It’s strange. It’s sometimes silly.
And it’s quietly moving in a way very few tie-in novels ever manage to be.

If you care about the Fourth Doctor, listen to it.
You won’t just get a story — you’ll get a voice coming home. show less