Magrs, Paul
About the Author:
Paul Magrs was born in Tyneside, England in 1969. He lives in Norwich and lectures in English Literature and Creative Wiritng at the University of East Anglia.
AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE:
3.3 out of 5
(3 books)
TOP PICK:
Doctor Who: Dracula!
Doctor Who: Dracula!
Part of the subseries of Who books which tie-in to famous stories/literature (Wizard of Oz, Robin Hood, Treasure Island, etcetera), this book features the First Doctor (William Hartnell) and his original companions Susan, Barbara and Ian. Arriving in Whitby, Yorkshire in 1901, the TARDIS travellers find the town gearing-up to celebrate Halloween as a series of mysterious murders have begun happening.
Okay, so it's vampires. Let's not kid ourselves or beat around the bush; there's no twist that it's secretly alien fish people or something like that, they're actual vampires. What you have to remember, however, is that vampires have been a part of Who lore since Tom Baker's era, so whilst some might find the supernatural elements in a science fiction series jarring (for example, I certainly did in Ncuti Gatwa's era), here is actually fits in pretty well. To begin with, how the vampiric shenanigans are revealed seems a bit hammy, but it would've been twice as bad if we'd had hammy vampires and then get told, actually it's killer robots pretending to be hammy vampires!
Where this book excels is in the setting of the scene. I've spend some time in Whitby (even went on an after-dark ghost tour) and Magrs does a wonderful job of conveying how the charming fishing town takes on an intriguing mysteriousness after the sun sets. Combined with things like a graveyard crumbling into the sea and the bones of Whitby Abbey dominating the skyline and it's easy to see why the place inspired Bram Stoker. All of this is something that Magrs takes full advantage of.
This is no great work of literature, to be sure, but it is a fun and atmospheric adventure for the Doctor in his early(ish) days of adventuring. There are some surprises to be had regarding the personalities introduced (are they/aren't they) and I rather enjoyed the unlikely, but really quite fitting, team-up of the First Doctor and Professor Abraham Van Helsing.
4 out of 5
Doctor Who: Sick Building
An original adventure featuring the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) and his companion Martha. On Tiermann's World the vast monster known as the Voracious Craw has arrived and begun devouring the planet. The Doctor and Martha arrive to evacuate the planet's only inhabitants, the Tiermann family, but are faced with unexpected resistance. Professor Tiermann is an unstable genius struggling to accept the loss of all he has created and the family home, the Dreamhome, is controlled by an artificial intelligence whose brilliance and growing insanity matches the Professor's own.
Here Magrs uses some tried and true science fiction concepts to create an interesting and surprisingly fresh adventure for the Doctor. On show we have an unstoppable alien beast, an isolated colony, a mad professor and robots running amok. There's more than a hint of 'The Forbidden Planet' about this book and its something that the author acknowledges in the text.
For me the best element of this was the robots. It's a classic and endlessly intriguing concept to see how artificially intelligent constructs react to being treated as a slave class or, worse, appliances. This gives the book a fantastically unhinged villain in the form of the Domovoi but, more importantly, also gives us two of the book's best protagonists; Barbara the vending machine and Toaster the sun bed. Their exploration of their newly realised individuality was my favourite thing about this story.
Every once in a while, however, something happens in the book which lets the rest of it down. The most significant and damaging of these things is how, at the eleventh hour, the Doctor deals with the threat of the Voracious Craw. It's too simple, too convenient and leaves you wondering both why he didn't do it earlier and why he's not travelling the galaxy doing it wherever these creatures are a threat.
4 out of 5
Doctor Who: Verdigris
A Past Doctor Adventure featuring the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee), his companion Jo Grant and the time-travelling adventurer Iris Wildthyme. Iris and her own companion, Tom, arrive in the 1970s to visit the Doctor in his exile on Earth. Strange events soon overtake them, however, as they encounter alien beings disguised as fictional characters and a mysterious force seems out to frame the Doctor and UNIT as nothing more than a hoax.
This book represents where Doctor Who meets post-modernism, which is to say that it's somewhat smug, self-referential and not nearly as clever as it thinks it is. Magrs has aimed for, admittedly affectionate, metatextual humour at the expense of the style of the Pertwee era of Who but, for my money, totally misplays his hand and produces what is really just a silly mess. It reads like a university student's unsuccessful attempt at aping the style of Douglas Adams and I found it mostly irritating.
Also, Iris Wildthyme needs to be addressed. She was created by Magrs as an unlicensed pastiche of the Doctor, what with her London-landmark time-machine, human companion and desire to galivant about the universe, so having her turn up in a licensed Doctor Who story just feels really weird and out of place. Here it's made explicit that she's also from Gallifrey and that her time-travelling London bus is, in fact, a TARDIS but all of that doesn't prevent her from feeling like she doesn't fit in the Doctor's world at all. Honestly, her presence here feels more like Magrs did it for his own amusement and self-congratulation than for any actual narrative motivation.
I will give Magrs credit that the way he writes is easy to read and well-paced, so that although I didn't like any of the actual elements of this story, I didn't actually find it too much of a chore getting through the book overall.
2 out of 5
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