BBC Books Pack Animals A Torchwood Novel

Author	Peter Anghelides
Published	2008

Synopsis: Shopping for wedding gifts is enjoyable, unless like Gwen you witness a Weevil massacre in the shopping center. A trip to the zoo is a great day out, until a date goes tragically wrong and Ianto is badly injured by stolen alien tech. And Halloween is a day of fun and frights, before unspeakable monsters invade the streets of Cardiff and it's no longer a trick or a treat for the terrified population. Torchwood can control small groups of scavengers, but now someone has given large numbers of predators a season ticket to Earth. Jack's investigation is hampered when he finds he's being investigated himself. Owen is convinced that it's just one guy who's toying with them. But will Torchwood find out before it's too late that the game is horribly real, and the deck is stacked against them?

• A Review by Leslie McMurtry

A Review by Leslie McMurtry 24/8/14

George Villiers once wrote, and I paraphrase, "What the devil does the plot signify except to bring in good things?" Pack Animals certainly adhered to that motto, and one that I can usually endorse with gusto. Peter Anghelides certainly brought in oodles of good things in Pack Animals, but, alas, I wasn't convinced he knew what to do with them at the conclusion. As I read the book over a long period of time, I kept picking it up and being astounded by the next new and conceptually quite stunning thing he had brought in, and also kept wondering how on Earth it was all going to resolve. Resolve it did; whether it was a satisfactory denouement is up to the individual reader. For me personally, it wasn't.

I won't list all the good things that the plot brings in, as that would simply ruin the read for anyone else. I think Pack Animals could almost claim to be Aristotelian in that it seems to take place in one single, very packed Cardiff day (possibly two days). Like The Sarah Jane Adventures' Warriors of Kudlak, all the chaos in Pack Animals starts with a seemingly innocuous game for kids: MonstaQuest, a trading-card game in which a Weevil is translated into a Toothsome. Probably the most convincing non-regular is David Brigstocke, a radio journalist - "Maybe clothes weren't important on radio" - whose persistent interceptions of Captain Jack are a thorn in the Torchwood leader's side. Some of the other characters, like Jenny Bolton and her mother, are ushered off too quickly to be anything but sympathy-knee-jerk characters, but the plight of both is still rather affecting. Torchwood seems to have a rival in Achenbrite, a mysterious company that seems to have cornered the market on outrageous teleporting alien animals. Their matriarch reminded me very much of Mrs Wormwood, also from The Sarah Jane Adventures. There are also explosions, car chases, extreme weather, lots of Cardiff Blues fans, and Owen has a weird moment with an Italian footballer's wife. I kid you not.

It's nice to see that Toshiko gets at least three big moments of courageous behavior, pushing her outside her comfort zone into combat and leadership situations (the grand finale is at her behest, though similar in some ways to the Torchwood comic "Jetsam"). She is also probably the wittiest character in Pack Animals. However, I was surprised when she outright killed an animal rather than searching for a better solution; in the Fifth Doctor's words, there should have been another way. Ianto is also particularly well-served in Pack Animals, going through a surprising and quite funny (and depending on what you think of Gareth David-Lloyd, potentially quite titillating) transformation. By far my favourite part was when Owen has to extract frightened and wounded innocent Cardiff residents from a dramatic bus crash and Weevil attack. Not only did he actually get to act like a doctor and confront a Weevil, he had to attempt triage knowing he couldn't afford to break a bone or cut himself accidentally - given that by this point he's dead and can't heal.

It's adult, and it's Torchwood: we know this from at least page 15, when Rhys and his friend Banana Boat are shopping and the narrator mentions "Sheelagh Thompson's tits." However, in general, despite some very bloody moments and a destructive ambition on scale with the series 1 two-parter, there are a lot of laughs in Pack Animals. Owen apprehends an alien working in a Cardiff hotel: "just another bloody nuisance in a city that already had enough of them to worry about without a flea-carrying extraterrestrial working illegally in the Welsh service industry. God, just imagine the Daily Mail headline." The novel is at least sufficiently aware of the ambiguity of its title to have some fun at our expense. " 'A pride. Like lions and cheetahs and all those pack animals,'" says Jack. " 'Pack animals carry things,' Ianto objected. 'Y'know, beasts of burden.'"

I wonder if the cover thing is some kind of game that we're supposed to play, as the interior contents of the book often have only the most tangential relation to the cover images. There is a tiger in Pack Animals, but that's about as far as it goes.