The Feast of the Drowned
|
|
BBC Books The Feast of the Drowned |
|
| Author | Stephen Cole |  |
| ISBN | 0 563 48644 9 | |
| Published | 2006 |
| Synopsis: When a naval cruiser sinks in mysterious circumstances in the North Sea, all aboard are lost. Rose is saddened to learn that the brother of her friend, Keisha, was among the dead. And yet he appears to them as a ghostly apparition, begging to be saved from the coming feast... the feast of the drowned. As the dead crew haunt loved ones all over London, the Doctor and Rose are drawn into a chilling mystery. What sank the ship, and why? When the cruiser's wreckage was towed up the Thames, what sinister force came with it? The river's dark waters are hiding an even darker secret, as preparations for the feast near their conclusion. |
Fishy... by Joe Ford 21/8/06
There were three things that this book got very right:
As a novel in its own right this could well be the best thing Stephen Cole has ever written. It is well-constructed, well-written and well-characterised. There is nothing about this book that you point at and say is especially weak (and compared to the early NAs that I have been reading lately, this is practically art!). I can imagine this is the book that will appeal more to fans of the old book series than the other two released this month. It is easily the most "adult" of the three, it has some truly scary moments, concerns itself with the sexual antics of three of the characters and even (gasp!) has some swearing in it. But I found it the most disappointing because it lack the joi de vivre of the others and concentrated on some pretty depressing themes. Also, for what started out as a promising idea, it soon fizzled out into the usual alien invasion nonsense we have seen so many times before, whereas the others made a stab at something entirely fresh and original. At least the alien scheme is nice and disgusting!
I loved the opening, the way each of these three have opened with a "pre credits sequence" is an excellent nod to the new series format and Feast of the Drowned features the best of the lot. And the climax of the book is so busy and full of graphic images it is hard not be impressed.
Enjoyable, and it's probably going to be the most popular of three, but after reading Jac Rayner's exhilarating Stone Rose and Justin Richards' imaginative Resurrection Casket, coming back to Earth to face aliens feels positively mundane. Good, but lacking because it comes in a set of three.
A Review by Finn Clark 18/12/06
"Efficient". That's my one-word review and it immediately puts The Feast of the Drowned on a quality plateau far above Stephen Cole's previous thing, The Monsters Inside. I wasn't screaming in pain or anything, which going on past form must be counted as a triumph for both author and publisher. This book does nothing much wrong. It's quite good. One of my main problems with it is an entirely subjective one caused by reading too much of Cole's other work (pity me) and I'm sure the target audience liked it.
I'll say more good things soon, but I want to bitch for a while first. This is the least flawed Stephen Cole book I've read in about four years, but in a fundamental way I think he's going backwards. I don't know why he wrote it. Okay, that's not true. If Justin Richards phoned me up and offered me thousands of pounds to write a 10th Doctor book, I'd say yes too... but it feels as if that was the principal motivation. It's a runaround. Quite an efficient runaround in its own way, with nifty horror monsters and a few good jokes, but it's basically an exercise in bolting together the usual plot coupons into something vaguely Doctor Who-shaped. Admittedly we can count ourselves lucky since The Monsters Inside didn't even succeed on that level, but look back at something like Vanishing Point. It had heart. Cole had things to say. Similarly his Tara Samms short stories felt like the work of a human being, not a Who-o-matic whose ambition in life is to become a second-rate Mark Gatiss.
In fairness, the prose is identifiably Stephen Cole's. I could hear his authorial voice, but that's not a compliment since the man's laddish jokiness gives me liver failure. Yes, I've reached the subjective bit. I'm sure most of the audience would be wondering what the hell I was drivelling on about, but it's hard for me to feel charitable when I'm turning yellow and bilious. Thankfully Cole's cut back on the "nudge nudge wink wink" nonsense that makes him sound about twelve, but even so his scenes of the Doctor flirting with Vida booted me right out of the book. I'm sure Tennant could have made the lines work and they're probably fine in the audiobook version, but on the page from start to finish I couldn't hear the Doctor for a moment. It was pure Steve Cole, straight from the toxic waste pipe. The din was deafening. Similarly even the witty jokes felt like Cole-isms. He pens some good lines (and some not-so-good ones) but I always felt that distance that comes from the author interposing himself between the reader and the text.
There's even something akin to a Signal From Fred on p56. "The soldiers, with a depressing lack of originality but a great deal of nippiness, made straight for him." Ah, fuck off. As a critical assessment of this novel, that outclasses any review you could possibly read.
That's the bad. Now for the good.
This book may be ripping off The Curse of Fenric, but at least it does so efficiently. It triumphs in an area that's traditionally eluded this author: competence. (I suspect he had help.) This book has a beginning, a middle and an end. The plot unfolds. It grows. It has that authentic Justin Richards momentum which propels the book on its own breathlessness until you turn the last page, put it down and reflect that that wasn't bad at all. It's quite exciting, really. It's also got a good dollop of horror, which I always like in Doctor Who. The monsters are the book's main raison d'etre and quite right too. They're creepy, they're convincingly dangerous and their biology is based on an interesting SF idea. I'll give a shiny new pin to any fan who can read this book without thinking "Haemovores!" but I don't remember accusing Cole of originality before and it doesn't seem fair to start bringing it up now.
It's set in London in the present day and thus stars Mickey and Jackie. That I quite liked. I think I prefer Steve Cole when he's writing about things with some reality to them. Life on a London council estate is something you can get your teeth into and I bought his versions of Mickey and Jackie more easily than his 10th Doctor. Meanwhile Rose gets an old school friend that somehow had me thinking I was reading about Ace, which might sound weird but is honestly how I responded. Said friend is also tied into a new bit of backstory for Mickey that had me groaning in the early chapters but improved later when Cole threw in a twist.
In one way this book is a perfect fit with its stablemates, The Resurrection Casket and The Stone Rose. In many ways all three are really rather good, but thinking about them afterwards for more than a few seconds made me think that they're a load of old arse and a waste of time. I think we can all congratulate BBC Books on achieving a level of consistency and a unified approach that had eluded them in their Eccleston-era releases. The Feast of the Drowned is moderately exciting. Its plot never stalls, but instead keeps the pages turning until you reach the end. It has some good one-liners. If I were ten years old, I'm sure this book would have satisfied me and left me happy to read more Doctor Who. Unfortunately this thirty-four-year-old was left feeling as if he'd just experienced an exercise in "seen it all before".
Ghostly Depths by Andrew Feryok 7/1/08
"Help me, Rose. Come to me. Please. Before the feast."The whole "trad and rad" argument seems rather dated nowadays with a new series on the air, but it is also an interesting way to look at oneself as a Doctor Who fan. I tend to see myself somewhere in the middle and slightly leaning more towards the "trad" category, enjoying anything that reminds me of the series I loved on screen, not wanting anything completely radical, but also wanting something different. It is therefore going to take a lot for a Doctor Who story in any medium to please me as the writer has to walk a very fine line. Stephen Cole's new series book seems to be of the type that should please me on this very level. It has a traditional setting: contemporary Earth, ghosts, monsters, and alien invasions, but also has some cool new twists such as the monsters being able to manipulate water itself. So exactly do I feel coming out of this book? Mixed.
- The ghost of Jay pleading to Rose, page 74, Chapter 7
I'll start by tackling the stuff that I enjoyed. The story faithfully recreates the pace and style of the new series with its character depth and hyperactive storytelling. The monsters are also conceptually quite intersting. I could perfectly imagine these creatures as being a solid part of a new series season and they are very scary. They are more than just living water. By their very nature, they can manipulate water on the molecular level to do all sorts of crazy things. Probably the scariest of these is their ability to kill people by draining the water from the body! Not a very pleasant way to go and even if you are lucky enough to survive, you are in a sickly and helpless state! The monsters have a particularly nasty plan as well. Acting as sirens, they use "ghosts" of drowned loved ones to lure people into the Thames river where they are transformed into horrific monsters that operate for the hive to lure others. The Doctor has often praised human beings for their most admirable and unique trait of showing love and compassion for others. It is this quality that has often kept humanity out of danger where other races have fallen. But the water monsters use this most admirable of traits against human beings in a very frightening manner. By manipulating our strongest and most powerful emotions, not even the military is able to stop a stampede of humanity making for the water like lemmings flinging themselves off cliffs. A positively horrific and cool notion for a Doctor Who villain!
The story also has some great characters. Rose gets a really good chance to shine as a hero equal to even the Doctor. She works out the threat long before the Doctor or everyone else and ends up getting herself in seriously deep water (no pun intended). However, just when you think Rose is going to be the damsel in distress for most of the book, she ends up becoming one of the driving forces that makes the Doctor's plan work in the end! Mickey also gets a chance to shine. Cole clearly likes this character as much as I do and uses him much more strongly as a definite companion whom the Doctor can rely on to assist him in making his investigations and plans possible. Mickey is truly admirable in this story, setting aside all his personal problems and doubts and just getting on with the task of helping the Doctor and Rose defeat the aliens because he knows what is important and what is just petty. He too has grown up as much as Rose and he is just wonderful as a character! The character of Huntley is also interesting. He at first seems to be a standard throwaway character who is there as cannon fodder for the alien threat to destroy. But he suddenly comes back towards the end and we see him to be a much stronger character who becomes a pseudo-companion for Rose.
All right, after all that praise, it is time to tackle the bad stuff. As good as the monsters are in this story, they are used in a fairly standard "alien invasion" fashion and the author seems to be going through the motions with their plans and motivations. In fact, at one point when the Doctor confronts them, the aliens themselves state that their true name and history is irrelevant. Only their plan to conquer the Earth matters. This kind of sums them up in a nutshell.
I also have a small problem with Keisha. Many have stated that they liked her because she shows how far Rose has grown from her roots. However, she is clearly a pathetic character who is supposed to be pathetic, but never manages to muster any sympathy in me, untill the very end when she gets off her butt and finally starts helping people.
My biggest problem with the book is the humor, which in turn leads to a discussion of the Doctor and Vida Swann. I really don't like Cole's rendition of the Tenth Doctor in this story. Granted, it was probably written with only The Christmas Invasion to go on (if he was even allowed to see this while writing), but the Doctor seems to have a manic sense of humor that makes Tom Baker look like Peter Davison! I realize that the Doctor is supposed to be alien and looks at the big picture in a different way from humans, but his humor in this story is just utterly flat and at times offensive in its timing of a situation. For instance, there is a sequence where Jay, one of the main protaganists, is dragged away by the alien monsters while the Doctor is earnestly trying to rescue him. The Doctor had been feeling sorry for Jay throughout the entire sequence and all of a sudden he starts cracking jokes about different ways to say "I'll be back." In fact, Cole gives the Doctor a very annoying habit of suddenly stopping in the middle a sentence, picking on a specific irrelevant line, and then repeating it in as many different fashions as he can think of. This is sort of amusing the first time he does it, but it loses its value as a form of humor very quickly. Vida also suffers from humor. She is supposed to be the sarcastic voice that is supposed to say how ridicolous everything is. But Cole just isn't very good at writing that kind of humor, or even timing it properly, so it just ends up looking arrogant and self-conscious.
On the whole, weighing all the pros and cons, I think I like this story. The monsters are good conceptually, but used in a rather mundain way. The use of ghosts as a lure is a very original idea that makes a good draw to the book and Rose and Mickey make great heroes. I don't like the humor at all in this book or Cole's rendition of the Tenth Doctor. But, despite this, I did get some entertainment value out of it and recommend this book if you are looking for a quick traditional story with the latest Doctor. 8/10