Mick Lewis

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2016156.html

This is an exceptionally violent Who book, taking the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria and dropping them into a vicious colonial conflict which is pretty clearly based on the Indonesian conquest of West Papua. This amount of sex and gore isn't really my thing (and seems wel out of place for a Who novel of the black and white era), but I found it a compelling read none the less - clearly the author is passionate about the setting (one of the more show more miserably botched decolonisations of the 1960s) and the story is tightly plotted and well told with compelling guest characters. Not yer typical Who novel, and not necessarily in a bad way. show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2125391.html

This is a Third Doctor novel with some fairly gritty horror elements. It wasn't at all to my taste; the same author has also done a pretty violent Second Doctor novel, Combat Rock, where I felt it was just about justifiable given the colonial situation on which it was based. Here however I felt there was no such excuse; it's a story of a rock band taken over by an alien entity and spreading Evil around 1970s Britain (where, in a dystopian alternate show more universe, they have started showing Blankety Blank several years before it affected our time line), attempts at pastiche flopping miserably in several places and simply gratuitous. One of the rather few Who books I really wouldn't recommend to anyone. show less

It's an interesting book in where it's trying to take Troughton (probably the safest and most reassuring Doctor) and his companions, but it winds up essentially just being the prose equivalent of Saw style torture porn. And as we know the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria are going to survive it lacks the tension that those need to work, so all it really has to offer is shock value.

In south-west England, a ragged band is gathering crowds of followers who seem hypnotised by the songs calling for violence and disorder. The Doctor detects strange energy focused in certain places, Jo and Captain Yates go undercover, one more effectively than the other.