Grave Matter by Justin Richards
1 May 2000
Good grief, has it really been almost three years? The last novel I reviewed for the marathon was The Well-Mannered War
in October 2021. Time commitment issues, you see. I'm hoping to rectify
this, and have added three more Sixth Doctor novels after this one to
make up the difference.
I felt a bit like I had stepped back in time with this one. No, not to
2000, but rather to the Hinchcliffe-Holmes era. Between the foggy,
out-of-the-way English setting, Victorian trappings, gothic horror, and
more zombie movie references than I could shake a stick at, this feels
at first like a story that Tom and Louise should be wandering through
rather than Six and Peri. But initial appearances can be deceiving.
The Doctor and Peri spend much of the first act of the book noticing and
investigating small anachronisms on the island of Dorsill, leading the
reader to perhaps suspect temporal interference at first. This
culminates in a moment where the Doctor sees the tell-tale lights of a
helicopter landing on an adjacent island and shouts for everyone not to
panic, only for the bemused residents to remark that he acts like he's
never seen a helicopter before. Brilliant!
As it turns out, they only assumed they'd arrived in the past because
the island they've landed on has chosen to maintain a pre-industrial
society. This turns the whole premise on its head, and makes the
decision to use Six and Peri settle into a kind of sense. It now becomes
obvious that this story was made for them.
In typical Who fashion, the source of all the trouble ends up being an
alien, a non-sentient microbe (the eponymous matter) which is capable of
regenerating the bodies of its hosts from even the most grievous of
injuries. The effects of this are sometimes grisly, especially in the
case of hosts whose bodies are damaged to the point of death. As the
microbe evolves and takes over human minds, it begins to take drastic
measures to preserve and spread itself.
The creepiest thing about it is that its hosts are fully aware of
everything that's going on, even when their body is being puppeted
around. This reminded me very strongly of the (slightly earlier) science
fiction series Animorphs, where the chief antagonists are a
species of slug-like aliens who can do the same thing. This realization,
which comes later in the novel after Peri is taken over, retroactively
makes scenes where we see infested barmaid Liz Trefoil stare blankly at
the zombie-like shape that used to be her lover, Dr. Madsen, come alive
again with a fresh sense of horror.
All this body horror is well-rendered, and needless to say, both easier
to stomach and to get away with than the televised material it's fitting
into. The prose medium puts us at a little bit of a remove and takes a
bit of the edge off of the worst of it.
The character writing is the strongest aspect of this book, in my
opinion. The author not only captures Six and Peri, but introduces a
large and memorable cast of side characters, making their dropping off
one-by-one all the more riveting. If I had any one complaint about Grave Matter,
it would simply be that the solution to the problem feels a little bit
too easy, and that I find it hard to believe that the Doctor didn't
consider the risk of flying hosts when he departs and leaves the story
on an ambiguous note.
It wasn't enough to detract from my enjoyment very much, however; I
thought this was both a very solid book and a nice addition to the Sixth
Doctor's career. I'm hoping that my other literary diversions later on
are just as interesting.
The Mark of the Rani is next.
(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 12 May 2024.)
No comments:
Post a Comment