DW Review: Forever Autumn

Time to get back to reading Doctor Who books, starting with Mark Morris' Forever Autumn. Basically: a horror story hamstrung by being for kids.


When reading this, I flashed back to The Hollow Men, Family of Blood, Nightmare Before Christmas, Peanuts and, of course, towards the end, Halloween. This isn't to say this book is unoriginal, just that it is firmly in a genre that we immediately recognise.

It was inevitable that Doctor Who would do Halloween, and Mark Morris does make a good attempt to make it quite scary, but, as I say, it is a book in the BBC Young Adult series, so has kids in it and is to be read by kids, so it can't be that scary 'cos it's "for the kiddies". Mark might well have done a lot more, but either held back, or was told to revise it.

Plot-wise, we find out that there was another alien species that landed on earth and influenced people to make them set up a place that the aliens could make use of. (It's never explicitly mentioned that the aliens are the basis of Halloween, but we can read between the lines.) There's only really a few scenes in this story, and could quite easily be adapted for the new series, but this does mean the story doesn't get very deep. It's more about the atmosphere, but it never gets built up enough to really be effective.

Character-wise, the Doctor is well done, Martha is a little generic, but at least she isn't Rose. We get the kids, but they are fairly much stereotype of "spunky go getter" etc. For the adults, there are vague parents and the local "witch", who only seems to be there to give Mark an excuse for the Doctor to have an easy entrance to the villains.

Overall, a decent book, worth reading, but definitely in the Young Adult vein.


Order: Reference to Gridlock, so after that. And the Doctor says he has met Martha's mother once so far. So, nice big gap after The Lazarus Experiment works well.

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