The Stones of Blood

Target novelisation Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood

Author	Terrance Dicks
Published	1980
ISBN	0 426 20099 3
First Edition Cover	Andrew Skilleter

Back cover blurb: Chanting, hooded figures gather inside a ring of ancient stones, using rituals of blood sacrifice to awaken the sleeping evil of the Ogri. The Doctor and Romana go from the countryside of present day England to a deep-space cruiser trapped in hyperspace in their attempt to track down an alien criminal, and unravel the mystery of the Stones of Blood. Luckily they have the help of the faithful K9...

• A weak story adapted in a weak era by Tim Roll-Pickering
• Roll-Pickering's Stones Gathers Moss by Jason A. Miller

A weak story adapted in a weak era by Tim Roll-Pickering 27/1/06

The cover is a clear attempt to produce a homage to the early Target covers by Chris Achilleos, but just doesn't come across at all well. The lower section feels too cluttered, whilst the Doctor's angle and expression are poorly captured. Tom Baker is one of the hardest of the Doctors to produce a likeness of at the best of times but to try such a strange experiment compounds the difference.

On television The Stones of Blood is one of the weakest stories of the Key to Time season, coming across as little more than a cheap filler set on Earth with a minimalistic cast. It is further convoluted by the heavy mystery in the early part of the story, before the action shifts to the Megara spaceship. This is not promising material for a 118 page novelisation and the result is little more than a turgid retread of the script, with few enhancements. However, as with many of Dicks' novelisations, the effects are tidied up with the Megara now portrayed as silver spheres (as originally planned) rather than flashly video effects. Dicks also provides a few odd asides describing the odd bit of a character's background, though declines to explain obscure bits such as the reference to "Doctor Cornish Fougous" - compilers of Doctor Who A to Zs of one form or another should note that this means an ancient cave and not some archeologist, despite what a doddering Professor Rumord may say in a moment of confusion. Elsewhere there are a few points which stress Romana's alienness as she struggles to understand Earth and the various terms used.

Reading Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood is an extremely simple task but it does not feel particularly rewarding and makes the reader wonder if it could have been adapted in a better way. And indeed one might want to speculate how this story might have been novelised in any other era of the series. From about 1982 onwards it's quite possible that David Fischer would have novelised it himself (although it seems that it was precisely because he didn't get to novelise either this story or The Androids of Tara that led to him and presumably other authors pushing to novelise their own scripts) and perhaps made the absurdity of the court scenes work whilst adding lots of background material explaining more about the Megara, Cessair of Diplos, the Ogri, De Vries or Professor Rumford. His later novelisation, Doctor Who and the Leisure Hive, is a good indication of how this can be done. Stretching anachronisms, a novelisation produced in the mid 1970s might have produced a more in depth effort from Terrance Dicks, rather than the standard routine work of much of his output from around 1980. One has to wonder if part of the reason for the Graham Williams era being so derided in subsequent years was the poor quality of the novelisations.

But instead the book is a product of the so-called "Bronze Age" of Target novelisations, the dark years of the series and as such does not shine. 2/10

Roll-Pickering's Stones Gathers Moss by Jason A. Miller 21/6/21

For the Memorial Day holiday in the U.S. in May 2019, I opted to pick one novelization at random out of my Doctor Who collection, and wound up with The Stones of Blood. I read the Part One material on the holiday itself and read the balance of the story over the next three days. I found Part One in particular exhilarating, marveling at Terrance's rapid-fire observations and asides on the story. He didn't let a paragraph go by without adding some neat little spin on the story, and I just had a great time.

But then I pulled up the Ratings Guide page for this book, and saw that it had generated only one review over the past 20-odd years, and that review was Tim Roll-Pickering's, and, boy, was he ever negative.

The story first. He doesn't like it. Fine. I do. The Megara in particular were hugely influential on my eventual career choice. As a kid I came to realize, as the rest of you fell in love with Seinfeld and Miami Vice and Golden Girls, that I loved watching courtroom dramas, especially in science fiction (Court Martial in the original Star Trek, and this and The Keys of Marinus in Doctor Who). I also love the visuals in The Stones of Blood on TV... I don't see "cheap filler" (that would be The Armageddon Factor). I love the outdoor-broadcast daytime shots of the stone circle, the slowly advancing Ogri crushing through DeVries' mansion, all the night shoots and that can't-look-away business with the two campers getting killed by the Ogri (with the Doctor never even finding out or avenging their deaths).

Roll-Pickering then takes Dicks to task in the novelization for not adding enough background detail, and for missing the rather obscure in-joke that is the name "Cornish Fougous". I'll be honest, I'm 45 now, and I was today years old when I learned that a fougou is an ancient cave. Can't blame Dicks for missing that. But I certainly do think there's a ton of added background detail, even without a lesson on fougous. I like Dicks' print reaction to the Doctor being mistaken for the estimable Professor Fougous, for one thing: "It might be useful to have a new name for a while, but he didn't much care for the sound of this one." I also credit Dicks for explaining the reference to John Aubrey ("a fatuous diarist") and for running a long way with the script's mention of Julius Caesar, even letting the Doctor take credit for disguising himself as a soothsayer and uttering the line "Beware the Ides of March". Dicks also works in a Marie Celeste reference; one day I'm gonna add a running tally of all Who novelizations that mention that ship, and I bet it'll be at least 20 (not even counting The Chase).

Lastly, Roll-Pickering is disappointed that David Fisher didn't write this thing -- although, about five years later, Fisher did adapt both this and The Androids of Tara for the Target novelizations audio book line. I never got to listen to Fisher's take on his own Stones of Blood, but his Tara adaptation was labored and a bit too satirical for my taste. Dicks has a more straight take on Stones of Blood, and I enjoy the less over-the-top approach.

So, forgetting about Tim Roll-Pickering's grievances, let's talk about what Dicks gets right in this book. He's in the book-a-month phase of his Target career, so one might understand, if not condone, if he merely transcribed the script without adding anything. But that's not what Dicks did; it's never what he did. He knows how to set a scene in as few words as possible, and he constantly levels jabs -- either at the script, if he doesn't like it, or at the villains working their way through the story, if he does like it.

The opening chapter here repeats the phrase "It might have been Stonehenge", to refer to the eponymous stone circle. That's an effective bit of scene-setting. We learn that Romana's "brisk bossiness infuriated the Doctor", which is a great five-word summary of the Season 16-long adversarial relationship between those two. Romana responds to the Doctor's circuitous lesson on English rain by saying "I see", while thinking in her head, "not seeing at all". Romana also, upon hearing a character use the expression "Brown Owl", wonders "if the people of this peculiar planet [Earth] had the power to change into birds". K9 is characterized as "quite satisfied with being an automaton"; when Romana says that he's on his last legs, Dicks tells us "K9 didn't actually have any legs", and you can imagine that he was proud of his own dry wit there.

Dicks has a great ease in writing for Tom Baker's Doctor, observing that he "seemed more interested in the stone circle than in their [Key to Time] mission". The Doctor is "overwhelmed" upon meeting Professor Amelia Rumford, which is a wonderful way of describing the force of nature which was the then-75-years-old Beatrix Lehmann on TV, one of the great companions-who-never-was (Dicks also has old Amelia speak "a rather dated Americanism with conscious pride"). He has the Doctor observe that provoking people makes them angry, "and that's when you learned something", and he is "rather amused by the fussy little" Megara. Even the Megara speaks with "a tinge of sadness" when trying to execute the Doctor.

I'll admit to not picking up at all on the fact that Vivien Fay was a bad-gal-hiding-as-a-hero in the first half of this story, the first time I saw it on TV, but Dicks does a great job of foreshadowing her villainy without signposting it. She enters as a "tall, black-hooded figure [who] momentarily... looked utterly sinister", but a "closer look revealed a tall, strikingly attractive dark-haired woman in her forties". Chapter Five ends with Vivien having a "faintly mocking smile still on her face", a nifty little mini-cliffhanger, shortly before she outs herself as a villainness. When she is finally defeated at the end, Dicks nicely has her "gazing wildly around her, unable to grasp how things had gone so suddenly wrong for her". Maybe that was a word-for-word stage direction taken from the camera script, but it sounds a lot more like dramatic literary invention to me.

Granted, there is the occasional error overlooked in the editing process -- Romana remembers visiting Calufrax in the previous story (The Pirate Planet), even though she didn't. Vivien Fay is not silver in her "true" form in the book, which is a sad loss; Susan Engel looked phenomenal in silver. And the "all the rage in Trenton, New Jersey" line about robot dogs is explained by saying that the Professor "could accept anything, however unusual, if it came from America" -- hey, now!

In the end, though, I think Dicks can proud of his adaption of this story. The TV episode takes some strange twists and turns, veering from gothic/Celtic horror, to a high-tech legal drama. The central irony of the story is that the Megara are pursuing Cessair for stealing the Great Seal of Diplos... and then the Doctor himself steals the Great Seal from around Cessair's neck (spoiler alert, it's the third segment of the Key to Time), right in front of the Megara, and they don't even notice. That's something that could have been pointed out in the novelization. But, with his observational humor and economic but keen insights given to each character, Dicks really didn't miss too much else about this story.