Doctor Who worth remembering: Warlock by Andrew Cartmel

Along with their friend Benny, the Seventh Doctor and Ace feature in Andrew Cartmel’s novel Warlock. What makes it stand out as a New Adventure?

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The Wilderness Years gave us so many great Doctor Who novels. So is Warlock by Andrew Cartmel one of them? Of course it is! It’s Andrew Cartmel! Let’s talk about it!

It’s 1995, Doctor Who still isn’t back on television, but at least Andrew Cartmel is back to tell us more of his Masterplan. Or, alternatively, “Cartmel actually has zero interest in what expectations the fandom at the time had burdened him with and wants to write a story about drugs and animal testing, with an almost nonexistent science-fiction element that’s a soft sequel to another book he wrote, which also did not deal with anything related to the Cartmel Masterplan”. Oh, and he also made it fantastic.

Look, I do not want to get into how much the Cartmel Masterplan did or didn’t actually exist, or how there might be a Furmanism on page 60 that I’ll have to look into later to see if it’s a reference or just how British people write. No, what I want to do is tell you to go onto Amazon or eBay as fast as possible so you can pay the late tax and get your hands on this excellent book yourself before someone else does.

Cat lovers be warned, Andrew Cartmel has some hot takes about animal testing and he knows which household pet you’d least like to see being tortured for the sake of advancements in medicine (still more restrained than Mark Gatiss though). The extent is enough that I’ve seen this called a “glorified PETA handbook”, but it honestly never goes to that extreme (I can’t imagine Cartmel approving of PETA’s kill shelters, for one thing).

Maybe if you hate animals you’ll bark (haha) at Cartmel and his vile vivisection villains, but for everyone else, your results will most likely sway more on the side of the author’s intent, rather than an eye roll and a scoff.

Let me also be candid with you and admit that the Doctor is barely in this book. Something that’s often (fairly) accused as a problem of the Virgin New Adventures is a lack of the Doctor, but unlike some of the worst offenders in the line, the Doctor’s presence is still always felt here. As expected of Cartmel, while used sparingly every appearance has the impact it needs.

The Seventh Doctor has less of a role in this novel, but that doesn’t prevent the brand new characters from being intriguing.

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Strong characters

Still as if to counter a problem it doesn’t have, the book does an incredible job of making you care about characters you have never known until this book. Actually, it does a phenomenal job in comparison to other novels, as the majority of Doctor Who books have a hard time making you care about anyone else besides the TARDIS team.

I mean, I’m reading State of Change and while I’m only 50 pages in so far, I kinda wanna check out during all these long chapters where the Doctor isn’t around. And it’s not just State of Change, very few of these types of books make you care as much as Andrew Cartmel does.

Everyone is described beautifully and given a chance to shine, or to disgust you. Remaining engaging no matter who it’s talking about, from the perspective of a cat named Chick that lives with Ace, Benny, and the Doctor, to the horrific origin of an animal abuser who takes the school’s hamsters to some acid when he assumes some girls are laughing at him. It’s astounding how much you can’t look away about characters you are just meeting for the first time. As if a car crash became a character description.

It’s not limited to the characters, either: disturbing detail is bursting within. Harsh details of a flattened pregnant mouse, followed by the description of what happens to the unneeded baby mice they breed on site (it involves scissors and a wastebasket of mouthing heads). These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to those hot takes about animal testing I mentioned earlier, it’s a pure horror show (also sex trafficking but I imagine for that it’s less controversial to say “is bad”).

Chapter 21 is especially tense, words to sweat by. The psychopathic Tommy stalking a cat that had bit him and escaped from its cage, now intending to do horrible experiments on it out of petty revenge for his troubles. Not knowing that the cat is affected by Warlock, and what will soon become of him as he’s fumbling around in the dark, caught in a situation of his own creation. One can almost hear a soundtrack by Kevin Manthei going on in the background the entire time.

Seven and Ace meet friends old and new in this novel.

Image Courtesy BBC Studios, BritBox

Warlock

Despite how much I’ve talked about it so far, the animal testing is actually just a third of this book’s story, as it’s mainly about the drug Warlock. While I will now get into briefly describing what actually happens in the book, I could honestly just type out half of Chapter 16 and you would know how good it is and that’s my job done. (Although to be completely transparent while I’m still in the afterglow of having read it, it’s hard not to over-hype it. It really was an extremely enjoyable read.)

The TARDIS Team of the Doctor, Bernice, the Doctor’s cat (really more Ace’s cat) named Chichester who is called Chick for short, and Ace have been hanging around the Smithwood Manor for nearly a year somewhere in the near future. The Doctor has started taking an interest in a new drug out on the street called Warlock, and when cyber technology yields unsatisfactory results on it, he sends Benny to New York to investigate. (This is made out to be more important then it ends up being, the only real critique I have for the book is that Bernice could stand to be in it more.)

Meanwhile Ace meets some hippies named Shell and Jack, who want her and the Doctor to investigate an animal testing group that has been stealing animals off the street. An animal testing group that is doing tests for a pharmaceutical company, one that’s interested in seeing how marketable Warlock might be for the open market. Ace and Chick decide to investigate on their own without the Doctor, and it all goes downhill from there.

Meanwhile again, an undercover widowed cop named Creed McIlveen, who is the secret main character of the book alongside Ace, experiences Warlock first hand, and after being recruited by the International Drug Enforcement Agency, and an encounter with two characters from Andrew Cartmel’s first book Cat’s Cradle: Warhead, nothing is ever the same again. And it’s ESPECIALLY never the same again when you get to the Canterbury Cathedral part.

Overall, Warlock is a novel that hooks you in and doesn’t let go.

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A novel to be consumed

It ends in a way that some may say is too rushed and too sad, with humans making human mistakes, and not all of our characters getting out alive. There is also mention of the Tunguska Event that actually retcons something from the novel Birthright which is in the same line so you’d think someone at Virgin Books would have caught that. Then again, if we can have three different Atlantis’s … Anyhow, I think it ends just right.

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Also, I’m fairly sure the exact sequence of events depicted on the cover art never happens in the book itself. Aspects of it happen at different times, but never all at once. It’s a strange decision.

From the start Warlock demands to be read, to be finished, to be consumed. To be taken like the drugs talked about within. I hate to keep ragging on it but Falls the Shadow is 356 pages and took me three months to finish. Warlock is 359 and took me three days. Unless descriptions of animal abuse make you physically ill, it’s completely worth your time and then some.

What do you think about Warlock or the assorted works of Andrew Cartmel? Would you have preferred he focussed less on a subject he was interested in and more on the Cartmel Masterplan, or at least, what the fandom believed it to be?

Should I next review Judgement of the Judoon by Colin Brake, essentially a buddy cop adventure where the Tenth Doctor plays good cop partnered with a Judoon playing the bad cop? Let us know in the comments below.