| CAT'S CRADLE: WITCH MARK by Andrew Hunt |
| Story 7 Synopsis: The TARDIS is still jiggered, and it lands the Doctor and Ace in the sleepy Welsh village of Llanfer Ceiriog. They find a stone circle and accidentally travel through to a parallel world, Tir na-n'Og. Here, humans struggle to survive against unicorns, trolls, dragons and centaurs. The Doctor learns there is a man, Goibhnie, who may have answers to the gloomy way the place is. The quest to find him is long and difficult, but eventually, he meets Goibhnie, whom he identifies as a Troifran. The whole realm is just an experiment, Ternog, and its time is up. The Doctor persuades him that he could keep the experiment going, but in the course of doing so, Goibhnie dies. The Doctor and Ace return to Earth, sealing the gateway forever, but not before he has taken one of Goibhnie's protoplasmic experiments, and used it to repair his knackered TARDIS. |
| Review:- The trilogy about the TARDIS comes to a strange end, wrapped up in a parallel world involving creatures of folklore who are quite lively... For a first novel, Hunt has some big shoes to step into, and it's arguable whether he succeeds. Though the structure of the book isn't too bad, and the Doctor's main quest to meet Goibhnie holds the narrative together quite well, too many other elements clash. Ace, luckily, is soon wrapped off in a twee subplot involving unicorns. Her place alongside the Doctor is taken by a young orphan named Bathsheba who believes Goibhnie has the magic power to restore her withered arm. Of course, she finds out that worshipping supreme beings is one thing, but expecting them to do anything for you is quite another. The two American travellers, Jack and David, seem purely to reference An American Werewolf In London, and their ally, Inspector Stevens, is altogether more fun for the story. The various magical groups are all much of a muchness, and the revelation that they're all living in a huge experiment is rather a letdown. Goibhnie being just another alien taking Earth for granted becomes terribly tedious, and since the Doctor can talk him around so easily, it doesn't do much for his credibility. His death comes with no particular cost, since he's already done most of the work, leaving the Doctor just to dot the i's and cross the t's. Even worse, the Doctor finds a solution to his TARDIS in a forgettable conclusion that turns out to have been a mistake (see Deceit), and sets up a minor running plot for the next few books. Probably the most interesting thing about this book, for me, was recently learning that its author went to the same primary and secondary schools as me, and he apparently feels this book was a failure. Although I don't think it's that bad, it could have been much better. |
| Disclaimer: I own a copy. |