Dead End

Shockers Series

by John Peel

Todd's nightmare begins when he receives a new dream car with a dangerously wicked past.

Genres: Horror

160 pages, Paperback

First published August 25, 1994

About the author

John Peel is the author of Doctor Who books and comic strips. Notably, he wrote the first original Doctor Who novel, Timewyrm: Genesys, to launch the Virgin New Adventures line. In the early 1990s he was commissioned by Target Books to write novelisations of several key Terry Nation Dalek stories of the 1960s after the rights were finally worked out. He later wrote several more original Daleks novels.

He has the distinction of being one of only three authors credited on a Target novelisation who had not either written a story for the TV series or been a part of the production team (the others were Nigel Robinson and Alison Bingeman).

Outside of Doctor Who, Peel has also written novels for the Star Trek franchise. Under the pseudonym "John Vincent", he wrote novelisations based upon episodes of the 1990s TV series James Bond Jr..

Reviews

[Evan Purcell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book is like swimming through a bunch of highway-based urban legends. It churns through plot like a machine, and while it's pretty episodic, it never feels that way. And that ending... dang! It's wonderfully creepy.

[BRANDON · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have extremely mixed feelings about this book. It was kind of cool that Peel pulled some popular urban legends into his story, it ended up feeling like an anthology episode. The heavy handed narration is reminiscent of The Twilight Zone or Night Gallery. Maybe if I was reading this fore the first time in the nineties and I was a fan of those shows, I would get a big kick out of it, but it was a miss for me. Definitely my least favorite of the shocker's series. Speaking of which, I'm relieved to have completed Shockers. Not only because it's rare to find find all the books in a vintage series, but also because the intentional zaniness was a little much.