Retrospective: Andrew Hunt by John Seavey 25/4/03
Technically, this could be just as easily called a review as a retrospective; Andrew Hunt, after all, only wrote one book, Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark, and that at the beginnings of the line. Thus, any retrospective of him has to ask the question, "Why wasn't he ever commissioned again?"
Certainly there's nothing in Witch Mark to suggest that a further commission was a guarantee. The novel is a rather average example of the pseudo-fantasy sub-genre of Doctor Who, in which various fantastical beasts and creatures appear but are given rational explanations at the end. Here, the unicorns, centaurs, dragons and demons turn out to be genetic experiments, but in substance it's not particularly different from The Sorcerer's Apprentice, to give another example of the genre.
And yet, the author of The Sorcerer's Apprentice has now been commissioned for eleven other books, whereas by all accounts, Andrew Hunt hasn't gotten a single proposal accepted since. Why?
It's not his prose style. His writing isn't particularly thrilling, but it's not bad either; it's clear, intelligible prose with a few clever moments, a few sweet moments, and a few sad moments here and there that stick out in the mind. It wouldn't win any awards, but it's easily comparable to any other TV tie-in series on the market.
His plot, likewise, isn't thrilling and twist-filled, but it's not bad for a debut novel, either. A few of his ideas do get jumbled together and don't work quite as they should (Herne, for example), but he at least tries to give some closure to the non-trilogy that was the Cat's Cradle series, and deserves some respect for that.
Ultimately, I think he wasn't commissioned because of his handling of the Doctor and Ace. They're not exactly off-model, but they're definitely not the Doctor and Ace we see elsewhere in the novels. The best way I can describe them is that they were written by someone who'd watched season 24, but had only been told about seasons 25 and 26. The Doctor here is the charmingly eccentric clown of Time and the Rani, and Ace seems barely developed at all. It's clearly not the direction that Virgin wanted to go with either character, and it jars when placed next to the Doctor of Warhead and Nightshade.
In the end, I don't think it was any great tragedy that we never got another Andrew Hunt novel (although I suspect he might disagree.) But I don't think he was any less worthy than the McIntees and Bulises of the Doctor Who canon, and perhaps a little more. Witch Mark shows just enough promise that I can wonder what might have been, but not so much that the wonder turns into lament.