BBC Books Forever Autumn

Author	Mark Morris
ISBN	1 846 07270 0
Published	2007

Synopsis: It is almost Halloween in the sleepy New England town of Blackwood Falls. Autumn leaves litter lawns and sidewalks, paper skeletons hang in windows, and carved pumpkins leer from stoops and front porches. The Doctor and Martha soon discover that something long-dormant has awoken in the town, and this will be no ordinary Halloween.

• A Review by Leslie McMurtry

A Review by Leslie McMurtry 24/11/14

I read almost all of the Ten/Martha books years ago, and for some strange reason this one always eluded me. It was certainly not intentional as, being a huge fan of Halloween, the premise - spooky goings-on in a New England town - would have attracted me.

Forever Autumn reminded me in many ways of Trevor Baxendale's Wishing Well, which I quite enjoyed and found to be a quintessentially British Doctor Who story. By contrast, Forever Autumn would have benefited enormously from a proofread from an American editor; it tries very hard to be authentic to the American Halloween experience, but doesn't quite make it. I kept waiting for the small errors to be some kind of clue to the falseness of the setting, to signify they were on another planet or in the still-unexplained haunted house in The Chase. The name of the town, Blackwood Falls, rings more closely with Bedford Falls of It's a Wonderful Life. The town Halloween ritual, as imagined by tween Rick Pirelli, for the most part feels authentic: “trick-or-treating, bobbing for apples, eating candy,” though burning a Pumpkin Man is not the typical American experience (like the burning of Zozobra in New Mexico, for example). The Pirelli family in Forever Autumn and most of the incidental characters are pleasant enough but not particularly memorable.

That said, there are many enjoyable additions to Forever Autumn, including witches of the sort the Third Doctor would approve of (“science, not sorcery, Miss Hawthorne”); some very frightening pumpkin-faced aliens; a nail-biting chase sequence involving Halloween sentient costumes; and, most unsettling of all, a test run for Torchwood: Children of Earth. There are some echoes of Zygon stories, but enough of interest about the hostile aliens to keep one turning the pages.

Morris can capture the Tenth Doctor's motormouth delivery (which feels strangely nostalgic after Eleven and Twelve) and describes Tennant's intensity as a moment when his eyes almost turn black. Martha is proactive and sympathetic but somewhat bland; there are only a handful of writers who can capture this companion/Doctor dynamic (and being a Martha fan, I'm already in the minority). There are some quite funny moments, though.

'Hey, don't know the Binks clan. They're good people. Very hospitable.'

'Yeah, right,' she [Martha] laughed.

'No, I'm serious. Old George thought Jar Jar was a figment of his imagination, but people often mistake telepathic messages for their own ideas.'