This Book is Full of Spiders (Seriously Dude, don't touch it)

It's rare that I start a book review worrying about how to write the title. It doesn't have a colon, but neither does it have brackets, but it seems wrong not to parenthesise at all. I also worry about the title of the film adaptation - if any - because most of the available options are slightly confusing.

About a year after thwarting an interdimensional plot to destroy the world, David and John are back to their old lives. They work dead-end jobs, John runs a website devoted to the weird, people with strange problems misguidedly come to them for help, and David continues a middle-distance relationship with his girlfriend Amy. Sometimes, very strange things happen to them, like the largely invisible, spider-like monster that bites David in the leg, possesses a cop and ends up sparking off an outbreak which threatens all human life and is mostly John and David's fault.

The sequel to John Dies at the End is a more coherent narrative, but retains the same mix of cosmic horror, conspiracy, fourth wall busting metafiction and crude, stoner humour that marked out the earlier book. David Wong - the author, rather than his pseudonymous alter-ego - mixes up the narrative a little more, adding several sections from Amy's sober, slightly Pollyanna perspective, alongside David the character's primary narration and the bits in which John, bereft of other witnesses, is purely awesome. There's even a chapter told from the PoV of Molly the dog.

It is, when you get right down to it, a poorly-written mess of a book, as spectacularly recreated by someone who is actually a pretty impressive writer. Every coarse joke, every cliche, every section of mangled, self-aggrandising or self-pitying prose is actually something that has been artfully and knowingly crafted as part of a novel that is by turns disturbing and hilarious; and often both at the same time.

A word of warning: I don't like spiders, but was able to cling to an early description of the creatures not really being spiders. Your mileage may vary, so if you're a big arachnophobe then seriously dude, don't touch it.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

A brief return to print books for Neil Gaiman's quasi-autobiographical cosmic horror fantasy, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. This is the result of my receiving a copy - well, actually three copies - for Christmas.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the story of an unnamed protagonist; an adult, recalling long-forgotten events in his childhood which revolve around a suicide and the three generations of Hempstock women who live on Hempstock Farm, where a duckpond might be the ocean at the edge of the world.

Drawn from events and places from Gaiman's childhood and peopled with recurring figures from his fiction (the Hempstocks have, he says, been with him a very long time), this is cosmic horror at its most intensely personal. The narrator is more lost than the reader throughout, and the fears of childhood - not of death, but of isolation, abandonment, disbelief and the confusions of the adult world - are evoked to sometimes chilling effect through the combination of the young protagonist's memories and his older self's commentary.

The book is not long and the plot not involved, but the prose is wonderful and the imagery compelling throughout, even at its most repulsive. If most of the characters are more archetypes than individuals, this is a consequence - and a deliberate one - of employing a child's viewpoint, through which things are simple and people are essentially who they are, with the possibility that they might not be mined as a rich source of horror.

Doctor Who: Nothing O'Clock

And here is my last review of the 11 Doctors, 11 Stories sequence - just in time for the much cheaper compilation to come out - and it's the Eleventh Doctor in Nothing O'Clock, but TV scribe and international bestseller Neil Gaiman.

After a handful of adventures, Amy Pond is looking forward to seeing her fiance again, but they arrive on Earth to find him gone... along with the rest of the population. An ancient Time Lord prison has failed and now the Kin are free, stalking the universe in search of the one thing they need; the last of the Time Lords.

Say what you like about Nightmare in Silver, Gaiman knows his Who and isn't afraid to play with it a bit. Here, he creates a foe both epic and personal. The Kin can destroy worlds, but they'll do it by coming and dealing with you one at a time. They are eerie and repulsive in their bizzare masks, and their vast power is all the more horrid for the pettiness of its employment.

A good end to a good series, with that one blip at the beginning. I recommend the cheaper compilation, 11 Doctors, 11 Stories to any Who fan.

Doctor Who: The Mystery of the Haunted Cottage

The Tenth Doctor gets a story from the pen of Derek Landy, prolific scribe of the Skulduggery Pleasant series.

The Doctor and Martha materialise in a white void, but stepping from the TARDIS find themselves in the English countryside. Where are they really? Who are those precocious children? What are the strange lights in the trees? And what are the smugglers up to in the caves under the woods? More importantly, is anything what it seems to be?

Landy makes a fine fist of writing the Tenth Doctor at his best; slightly lost, racing through the landscape with a machine gun stutter of words and theories instead of striding like a lonely god, and captures both the spark and the tragedy of the relationship with Martha (which, it occurs to me, has some rather striking parallels with the relationship between the Joker and Harley Quinn; there's a sobering thought). The weird fictional world is incomplete, but fantastically realised in its incompleteness.

So, yeah; I like this one.

Sometime at the start of next week, I shall finish this series of reviews with relative veteran Neil Gaiman's Nothing O'Clock.

Doctor Who: The Beast of Babylon

Charlie Higson, author of the Young James Bond novels and veteran of The Fast Show, takes up the reins for the Ninth Doctor.

Technically set at the very end of Rose, between the TARDIS vanishing and returning seconds later to take Rose Tyler away, we find the Doctor chasing Starmen; godlike beings which feed on stars. Can he neutralise them before they destroy another world, and will his new companion, Ali, help or hinder.

Higson writes the Ninth Doctor well, but there is a hiccup in the simple story here. Ali is, although concealed at first via the medium and reader expectations, a giant scorpion-creature with poisonous stingers and deadly, scything claws. She is obnoxiously bright, but also possessed of an instinctive defensive rage, and kills several people in her efforts to protect the Doctor. Regardless of species predisposition, it is hard to accept that the Doctor would be as okay with this as presented here.

This is a shame, because the book is otherwise well-written and the adventure rattles along nicely. The idea of exploring the Doctor's singular preference for human companions is an interesting one, but not quite explored enough, especially given the amount of treatment that the more vexed question of companions who kill have received through Leela and her spiritual successors.

Doctor Who: Spore

Spore is the Eighth Doctor short story, written by Alex Scarrow of Timeriders fame. Again, I'm not especially familiar with his work, but I know the name.

The Eighth Doctor is a bit of a challenge, of course. He has two definitively canonical appearances, and one of those post-dates this book, and yet there is a wealth of deuterocanonical novels, comic strips and audio plays to muddy the waters. Scarrow opts to keep it simple, and the Doctor thus appears without a companion on this occasion.

A mysterious object has landed in Nevada, and now the entire area is going out of contact. The Doctor has a nasty suspicion that he knows what is going on, and there's an easy way to stop it. Unfortunately, the Planet Earth won't have that knowledge for about fifty years, and if he's right then it certainly doesn't have fifty years in which to find it.

Spore is a disaster movie with the Doctor in it, more than an invasion story, but Scarrow's limited hard science is actually better than in most such tales, covering aspects of quantum theory as well as the nature of von Neumman machines. The Doctor is pretty solidly portrayed, and has an good foil in the form of a plucky Army scientist, which is important.

Doctor Who: The Ripple Effect

Lucky Number Seven has his story penned by Malorie Blackman, author of the Noughts and Crosses series, so it should be no surprise that it tackles the subject of race and racism.

Escaping from a natural time hazard, the TARDIS is thrown down on a world called Skaro; home to the Daleks, the most civilised and peaceful race in the galaxy. Has something happened to change the nature of the Doctor's oldest enemies, or is this some nefarious scheme? And if something has changed, can the Doctor accept it?

Blackman chooses to play with alternate timelines in order to touch on the question of whether the Daleks are irredeemably evil, and if not, what that says about the Doctor, who can never believe in their redemption. The Seventh Doctor - mysterious, secretive, and himself somewhat sinister, yet at heart mired in the same self-doubt that kept the Fourth from wiping out the Daleks in their cradle - is a perfect foil for this.

The narrative is simple enough, and driven - as all the best Seventh Doctor stories are - by the dynamic of the relationship between the Doctor and Ace. Like a dark version of Troughton's cosmic clown, the Seventh Doctor's light exterior hides a dark and weary heart. More than any other companion the Doctor's protege, Ace's more open and trusting nature is a mirror for his suspicions and resignation.