REVIEW: Doctor Who: The Crawling Terror by Mike Tucker (Novel)

The Doctor and Clara take on giant insects in Mike Tucker’s Doctor Who: The Crawling Terror.

(Credit: BBC Book)

As we get nearer and nearer to the fall premiere of Doctor Who Series 9, my yearning for new adventures with the Twelfth Doctor just keeps getting stronger and stronger. Seeing all of these set photos and reading interviews with teasing glimpses of upcoming storylines just makes me long to return to Peter Capaldi’s caustic Doctor and, yes, even Clara.

Fortunately, there are a few options out there to help fill the void. Last week I finally finished Justin Richard’s excellent Twelfth Doctor novel, Silhouette (read my review here). My appetite whetted, I hungrily devoured The Crawling Terror, one of the two remaining Twelfth Doctor adventures released last fall by BBC Books.

First, here’s the publisher’s summary to fill you in:

"“Well, I doubt you’ll ever see a bigger insect.”Gabby Nichols is putting her son to bed when she hears her daughter cry out. ‘Mummy there’s a daddy longlegs in my room!’ Then the screaming starts… Alan Travers is heading home from the pub when something rushes his face – aspider’s web. Then something huge and deadly lumbers from the shadows… Kevin Alperton is on his way to school when he is attacked by a mosquito. A big one. Then things get dangerous.But it isn’t the dead man cocooned inside a huge mass of web that worries the Doctor. It isn’t the swarming, mutated insects that make him nervous. It isn’t an old man’s garbled memories of past dangers that intrigue him.With the village cut off from the outside world, and the insects becoming more and more dangerous, the Doctor knows that no one is safe. Not unless he can decode the strange symbols engraved on an ancient stone circle, and unravel a mystery dating back to the Second World War."

The Crawling Terror was written by Mike Tucker, a prolific Doctor Who author (usually with co-author Robert Perry), and one of the few people to have worked on both the original Doctor Who (as a visual effects assistant from 1985-1989) and the revived series (as a model unit supervisor on Series 1 and 2). This is the first of Tucker’s books that I’ve read and, while it’s a perfectly serviceable Doctor Who adventure, it lacks the finesse and personality I found in Silhouette.

More from Winter is Coming

I have to warn you, I managed to stay spoiler-free in my Silhouette review, but in order to illustrate a few points about The Crawling Terror, I have to throw out a few extremely mild spoilers.

The book starts off on a sour note; there’s a glaring typo on the second page, and much of the story is contradictory in the beginning. Gabby Nichols, the mother mentioned in the synopsis above, is described in the first chapter as being new in town, with a husband working long hours outside of the village. It’s specifically mentioned that the family knows next to no one in Ringstone, and Gabby ponders taking the family out that weekend to get acquainted.

The next chapter has Gabby rushing to the local veterinarian’s office, with whom she is overly familiar. This, despite the fact that the Nichols family is not described as having any pets. The vet, Angela, mentions Gabby previously bringing in injured blackbirds, but when did she have time to do this? Surely there’s a reasonable explanation, but it’s never given to us.

The Doctor and Clara arrive just as Angela is loading a giant daddy long-legs into her car, having just completed her autopsy. A few pages later, when Clara and the Doctor leave with the local constable, Angela offers to stay behind so she can finish performing an autopsy on the same daddy long-legs. Wait…didn’t you just do that?

Another frustrating story point is the fact that the Doctor is advised almost immediately upon arriving in the village that a strange new science park has recently been built, and the townspeople like to joke that they’re creating monsters there. The Doctor seems alarmed at this news but makes absolutely zero effort to investigate what we all know is the source of the giant insects.

Once things get going, The Crawling Terror makes up for these misgivings a little with an inspired plot and some largely entertaining action sequences. A lot of the dialogue is stilted in my opinion, though, and unlike Silhouette, most of the Doctor’s lines seem oddly out of place for his newest incarnation.

Three Twelfth Doctor books were released in September 2014.

(Credit: BBC Books)

I would still recommend The Crawling Terror, but with a heavy warning that it is not the best of the best. It’s a quick read at 250 pages and despite the problems listed above, it’s no worse than many of the nonsensical episodes we’ve gotten under Steven Moffat’s reign (including much of Series 8 itself).

As I mentioned, there were three Twelfth Doctor books released last September. The remaining book is The Blood Cell by James Goss. I’ll be devouring that one in the next week and should have a review up soon. And, of course, there are three new Twelfth Doctor books hitting bookshelves this September, too.

What do you think? Did you read The Crawling Terror? Do you agree with my critique? Sound off in the comments below!

Next: Peter Capaldi Talks Doctor Who Series 9, Reveals First Photo!