Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders

Arachnophobes beware: the planet of Metebellis Three is crawling with spiders. Not just any spiders, but giant, intelligent spiders that enslave humans and can kill with their minds. The (Third) Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith face a very tough foe indeed, but it's a matter of life and death…

Fans of the television show know that this is the Third Doctor's final adventure before he regenerates into the Fourth Doctor, and what a thrilling adventure it is. The spiders are extremely creepy; I often had horrible prickles running down my spine just imagining them. (I can't decide whether it was brilliant or idiotic of me to read this immediately after watching The Desolation of Smaug, which features some equally terrifying spiders.) The story show more kept me turning the pages quickly and I finished the book in a couple of hours. It is perfect for those days when you want something short and snappy to jolt you out of a reading funk. show less

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Dicks has taken a Third Doctor TV story which by all accounts (I haven’t seen it) was decidedly average and turned it into a cracking good read. It was one of the first of his many many Doctor Who books (and he’s still at it), and for those of us (like me) who occasionally mock the by-the-numbers approach of his later efforts, it’s very much worth re-reading the earlier ones to remind ourselves of how good he was at turning dodgy special effects and occasionally wooden acting into a novel that caught the spirit of what he, as script editor, had no doubt hoped and intended the original TV version to be.