| THE MANY HANDS by Dale Smith |
| Story 24 Synopsis: The TARDIS lands in Edinburgh Castle, 1759, and the Doctor and Martha pursue a stranger on a stagecoach, who turns out to be quite dead. They're both arrested. But they escape, Martha following the dead body, and ending up in the clutches of Alexander Monro. The Doctor leads his pursuers down a slope, but they are all confronted by corpses rising from the waters of the Loch. They finally escape across the water in an abandoned boat, and are given refuge by a Minister. The corpses follow, and are joined by others from a graveyard, including the previous Minister. The Doctor finds each corpses has a hand on its chest, and when he uses his Sonic to disrupt the static electricity controlling the hand, he causes the hands to band together, leaving their corpse carriers, and then heading away from the church. Martha meanwhile finds that Monro bought the first hand, which copied his own hand from a blood sample. Using electricity, he has caused multiple hands to be reproduced, and due to the Doctor's interference, these hands band together into a giant figure. Martha flees from it, eventually getting stuck in derelict houses near the Loch. The Doctor turns up when the other hand-creature arrives, and joins with its twin, creating a single entity, Kith. It declares that it will need further samples from 80,000 people, but to stop it, the Doctor makes a counter-offer of himself instead. Kith learns of the TARDIS, and heads toward the Castle. The Doctor manages to arrive first, and using a piece of string and a thunderstorm, breaks the tension holding Kith together, and all the hands roll back down to the Loch, which is later filled in. A couple of the hands survive, though... |
| Review:- A strange place (to Martha, anyway) and a strange time add up to one of the more interesting books in this range. The story starts with a bang, as we find the Doctor and Martha in mid-pursuit of a ghastly ghostly figure, and a stagecoach dash through the streets of Edinburgh. The early showing for the Sonic is but a foretaste of its later all-encompassing efforts, but after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, the two leads split up and allow the story to progress twice as quickly through alternating chapters. This creates a great sense of pace, which evokes the spirit of the TV series better than many of these books do. The Doctor has to deal with soldiers trying to hang him as a spy, and then save them from the advancing corpses from the Loch. A convenient pause inside a church creates some memorable drama, and the mild horror of corpses rising from a graveyard, but once the realisation about competiting power sources and the presence of Benjamin Franklin is factored in, then the battle starts heading to its source. Meanwhile, Martha has a nasty horror scene of her own, trapped in a darkened room with a multitude of disembodied hands. Even when she escapes, and finds that Alexander Munro's ambitions are blinded by loss, she's soon too busy as she tries to escape from a vengeful giant creature. So it is then, that the two travellers reunite at the moment that the two competing creatures also reunite, and make with the explanations (sort of). Onk Ndell Kith is a duff name (and the Acknowledgements which reveal where the name derives from is unhelpful), but Kith is a credible enough foe, whose aims are all too evident, and his interest in the TARDIS leads to the dramatic finale, which is bound to jog memories of King Kong. It helps that the resolution involves an electrical storm, albeit boosted by the all-amazing Sonic. This is a nice touch and a good illustration that historicals don't need to be saccharine tributes to famous people. As Franklin's many works are as familiar to me as Edinburgh itself or the time period 1759 AD (i.e. not very), I felt enriched/educated by this book, as well as hugely entertained. Though Kith is perhaps rather bland, Monro's desire to bring his father back to him is all too appreciable to anyone who's experienced the loss of loved ones. Overall, this is a rewarding book, which ensures its readers are kept involved all the time, and not expected too much of. |
| Disclaimer: I've read the book. |