The Great Virgin New Adventures Review: St. Anthony’s Fire & Falls The Shadow

It’s been a little while, but we’re finally back with our look at the Virgin New Adventures, a series of novels published in the early 1990s that detailed the Doctor’s continuing adventures after the show was cancelled in 1989. This time, we look back at the second of Mark Gatiss’ novels and travel to the wordy and overstuffed, Daniel O’Mahony’s adventure in the mysterious house Shadowfell.

St. Anthony’s Fire

Written by: Mark Gatiss

I really enjoyed the last entry to the range from Gatiss in the form of Nightshade. It was a book that I seriously couldn’t put down. And I was hoping that this book would be similar, though I had my doubts that it would reach the same heights. While Nightshade looked at the nostalgia we feel for the television shows and genres we enjoyed years earlier, St. Anthony’s Fire sets out to give us a complete science-fiction adventure, in the best Terry Nation-esc way possible by giving us a completely alien landscape

In the beginning, Gatiss succeeds. We’ve got lizard aliens, toned down and made a little more relatable thanks to some much-needed humanity injected into them, with these lizards fearful, haunted, imaginative and eager to impress, all emotions that might be felt in a wartime situation. Even the war-torn planet of Beltrushia feels like something taken from WW1 with its muddy, dug-out trenches. It’s doing what Doctor Who does so very well and takes the familiar and puts it in an unfamiliar situation. His world-building is excellent. Maybe not as good as Nightshade but it’s believable.

Gatiss’ decent character work continues in this book too. Ace, though she’s not in it very much, feels like a companion whose time with the Doctor is coming to an end, deciding to stay behind for a break on a pastoral planet while the Doctor and Bernice go off and visit a neighbouring planet. There is however clearly a need to favour one companion over another and in this case, Bernice wins, maybe as a way of showing writers how to handle her character in a few novels time when Ace has left. It’s quite funny though that for all the Doctor’s worrying about Ace being left behind, Bernice proves that she doesn’t really need the Doctor, getting herself out of situations with her wit and charm alone. And it’s important to remember that this is Gatiss’ first time writing for Bernice, so the fact that he got such a good handle on her character the first time around when so many other writers have failed, deserves some credit.

And while the plot on Beltrushia feels very predictable at first, with the Doctor and Bernice ending up separated and on different sides in an alien war, Gatiss doesn’t dwell in this predictability and doesn’t waste time in reuniting them both in glorious fashion. Where Gatiss’ little war succeeds is in its commentary on the very subject it’s handling, with lizard leader Grek questioning whether war is really worth it when so little is left once the dust settles. But soon, with the war winding down, the skies are filled with alien spaceships and a mysterious yellow, glowing blob which keeps emerging from the ground and killing survivors.

Where the book begins to falter and stop to almost a halt, is in its secondary plot. Ace, as well as the planet she was relaxing on, have been brainwashed and taken into an evil religious cult, which uses sun burning engines to power them around the galaxy. They have settled on taking Beltrushia next. In typical New Adventures fashion, this religious order is so disgusting that it’s pretty hard to read, with their leader who eats babies, (seriously) and the second in command who seems to be made fun of because he’s a dwarf. Sure he’s just as repugnant as the leader, and his leering and treatment of Ace is nothing short of disgusting, but so is some of the descriptions of this character. But let’s try to remember this book was written in the 90s, there are some descriptions you rightly wouldn’t get away with nowadays.

What makes matters even worse is that they don’t actually do anything, they are just evil for the sake of it, not because there is some sort of belief in them. As a result, Gatiss goes into overdrive, overdoing just how nasty and evil they are, though that still doesn’t work because there is nothing there for these evildoers to do apart from blow up planets and attack people for the sake of it.

It’s such a shame because the beginning of the book starts off so strong. But it all begins to dissolve from the middle onwards. The Doctor does take far too long to actually do anything about the things that are happening around him and while Bernice does make a nice friendship by the end, it doesn’t really mean anything as they hardly feature by the time the book wraps up. The actual monster of the book, the yellow blob doesn’t do anything but look silly next to the nastiness of the other baddies, so the fear it’s supposed to invoke never quite hits home and while almost none of the inhabitants of Beltrushia make it to the end, the book has grown so violent that the loss of an entire planet is hard to take seriously.

The opening act of St. Anthony’s Fire was very evocative and interesting. Sadly, it begins to lose its way very quickly, as Gatiss stumbles to explain what is going on. It feels like an idea that could have been done with being in a book with a higher page count. As a result, we’ve got a very uneven book and one that leaves a rather nasty taste in the mouth long after you’ve put it back on the shelf.

Falls the Shadow

Written By: Daniel O’Mahony

I hadn’t heard much about Falls The Shadow before I set off into the story. A book like that, with the age it is, is an interesting thing, sometimes you discover something genuinely exciting, and sometimes, like Falls the Shadow, you realise why no one ever really bothered to review it before.

Firstly, it feels very familiar. Mahony has obviously taken inspiration from the Seventh Doctor story Ghost Light, and while that story does have a charm to it, Falls the Shadow loses itself in a house surrounded by torturing owners, people who aren’t all there, murderers and is genuinely messed up. Maybe it would have been a little better had it not come just two books after another one set in a mysterious English manor house?

Looking past all the violence that litters the page, I’ll give Mahony some credit and say that there are some interesting ideas on offer here, though they do end up feeling more interesting in theory. The other realm of  Interstitial Time, for example, is never completely explained, just told to us as a way of getting time travel to blink other universes out of existence? The baddies of the book come from the idea of what lies in between those two universes and they have all come to live in the mysterious house of Shadowfell. However, their insanity quickly grows monotonous.

The house can change rooms around at the speed of thought, though it doesn’t really come to anything within these pages. With much of the action taking place in the house, it’s nice when we visit the city of Cathedral, a boring place for a holiday, as Bernice discovers, but it does get us out of the overused house setting.

Unfortunately, none of these ideas ever come to anything exciting, though the book wouldn’t function without them. We’d just have the Doctor, Ace and Bernice bumbling around a big house in the multiverse with a number of lunatics trying to kill them. It doesn’t help that the villains, Gabriel and Tanith are just sadistic and violent for the sake of it and all the side characters are disposed of with nothing more, it seems, than a shrug. And a book, where nothing happens, with a page count of 356, feels unnecessarily long.

But his handle on Ace and Bernice is pretty good. Bernice is used brilliantly here, witty and charming, she gets a large bulk of the story to herself. And Ace feels much more like the character we loved on television. Less well done though is the Doctor, who seems out of sorts from the moment he steps out of the TARDIS. While some of it is explained by the house being in the gap between universes (?), he does make a number of stupid decisions, like letting Bernice wander off and explore the setting by herself while he and Ace explore the house from different ends and then he wonders why they all got into so much trouble.

Given how this was Mahony’s first Doctor Who novel, I can forgive a little bit. But what I can’t forgive is a lot of the over descriptive waffle that litters his prose. I don’t want to know what a character is wearing right down to the colour of his shoelaces. But that is the sort of nonsense we are subjected to here. Some people might like this need to over-describe everything, needing to know every minute little detail. I don’t and as a result, there is a large, large portion of this book where absolutely nothing happens.

This book took me months to finish. I just couldn’t get past the bizarre need to describe the paint drying and sadistic violence. If you weren’t familiar with these books, one might wonder if there was some sadistic pact in the writing room, to get authors to make things so violent you just put the books down and never read them again! As a result, unless you are going to re-read everything, Falls the Shadow is a very skiable book. I went into this book with an open mind, some of it was alright but for the most part, it deserves to be kept in the shadows.

Next Time: Parasite & Warlock!