BOOK
Doctor Who
Shell Shock

Author: Simon A Forward
Telos Publishing
www.telos.co.uk
RRP £10.00 (standard hardback), £25.00 (deluxe hardback)
ISBN 1 903889 16 2 (standard hardback)
ISBN 1 903889 17 0 (deluxe hardback)
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The TARDIS materialises aboard a derelict ship adrift upon a vast ocean on an alien world. When the derelict is sunk, Peri drowns. Meanwhile the Doctor finds himself washed up on a beach with only intelligent crabs and a shell-shocked war veteran for company...

There have been many great tales told of the sea, as John Cleese once boldly proclaimed in Monty Python's Flying Circus. And others, like this one, only marginally connected with it. In fact this is the third Doctor Who novella, after Ghost Ship and Rip Tide, to be concerned with the sea and/or the coast.

The title of this piece, together with the presence of sentient crabs, might have led you to expect a light-hearted spoof (set in the Crab Nebula no doubt). Certainly there are a fair few puns, as you would expect from a Sixth Doctor book ("a word in your shell-like", says the Time Lord at one point), while the "sinister sponge" that is encountered by Peri might refer to one of the wackier titled stories from the 1976 Doctor Who annual.

However, this book is predominantly concerned with the serious topics of wounds and the healing process, in terms of the body, the mind and the landscape. The island upon which the Doctor finds himself has been scarred by a devastating war, while the shell-shocked recluse Ranger is battle-damaged in his own tragic way. Even Peri bears some surprising emotional scars from her childhood, which bring a new and disturbing interpretation to her sleep-talking scene in Planet of Fire.

In my review of the author's first Who novel - Drift, for BBC Books - I commented upon Forward's offbeat writing style, which offered up some particularly idiosyncratic metaphors and similes. That style, which made Drift slow going at times, is perfectly suited to the shorter medium of the novella. Here we have the Doctor treading gingerly, "as if he had trodden on a Fabergé egg". When a crab called Scrounger clings to a fragile hope, it is, appropriately enough for a creature of the sea, "a hope built of sand".

Forward keeps us guessing throughout much of the book, even when we think we know what is going on. For a time, for instance, it seems as though Scrounger was the one who caused the derelict to sink, which disturbs us because he seems like such a nice character. And what happens to Peri is just plain weird.

All in all, this is a very readable book, and it runs to just about the right length. Telos has yet to produce a Who novella that matches the excellence of its first one, Time and Relative, but Shell Shock is definitely my second favourite to date. If you don't like this, you must be very crabby indeed.

Richard McGinlay

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