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Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures #32
Doctor Who: Falls the Shadow
'We are deranged. We are psychopaths, sociopaths, up the garden path,' said Tanith. 'We are mad, and you are trapped with us.'
The TARDIS is imprisoned in a house called Shadowfell, where a man is ready to commence the next phase of an experiment that will remake the world.
A stranger dressed in grey watches from a hillside, searching for the sinister powers growing within the house. A killer appears from the surrounding forest, determined to carry out her deadly instructions. In the cellar, something lingers, observing and influencing events, waiting to take on flesh and emerge. And trapped in alien darkness, the last survivor of a doomed race mourns for the lost planet Earth.
The TARDIS is imprisoned in a house called Shadowfell, where a man is ready to commence the next phase of an experiment that will remake the world.
A stranger dressed in grey watches from a hillside, searching for the sinister powers growing within the house. A killer appears from the surrounding forest, determined to carry out her deadly instructions. In the cellar, something lingers, observing and influencing events, waiting to take on flesh and emerge. And trapped in alien darkness, the last survivor of a doomed race mourns for the lost planet Earth.
356 pages, Paperback
First published November 17, 1994
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July 26, 2014
'Ghost Light' through the prism of Grant Morrison’s 'Doom Patrol'.
If you wanted to give someone a New Adventure to confirm their worst impressions of them, 'Falls The Shadow' would be the perfect candidate. Title pretentiously stolen from literature? Check. Doctor sidelined for a long period? Check. Much angst and torturing of the regulars? Check. Obscurer-than-thou continuity references? Check. Every idea the author’s ever had chucked in? Check. In need of a tighter edit? Check.
That though would be slightly unfair. The New Adventures were tremendously exciting at the time but hindsight suggests that theirs was an uneven brilliance, more one of magnificent moments than genius sustained over novels, let alone a series. That’s the price of Virgin’s approach, of commissioning inexperienced authors to drive the series. They had youth and enthusiasm to power their way through the writing of a novel but largely not the experience to produce a consistently brilliant work as a thematic whole. Energy and imagination were the keywords. As a result they’ve largely aged badly, ideas which were new and fresh at the time now staled by cultural familiarity.
In their desperation to take charge of the series the fans turned writers were unafraid to try new things, to bring new and contemporary influences to the series in the manner initiated by the TV show’s last script editor Andrew Cartmel. Sometimes this manifested itself as continuity porn, writers delving into the parts of the show’s history they’d loved (Craig Hinton and Gary Russell the prime examples), sometimes older writers imposed older influences (John Peel, Chris Bulis and Terrance Dicks). But, as the series went on, the influences of younger authors steeped in contemporary culture came to the fore. Paul Cornell’s 'Timewyrm: Revelation' kickstarted this, clearly influenced by the more surreal end of comics in the 80s and 90s and bringing in contemporary musical and cultural references. Once the dam was burst, the references became a flood, almost a race to see how much could be crammed in.
'Falls The Shadow' largely eschews the contemporary references, and even the continuity is well chosen – outside of past stories being used to reinforces character points the references are logically chosen to add texture to the plot and root them in the Who universe (primarily 'The Time Monster' and 'Shada'). Where it’s far less subtle is in showing the roots of the tale. O’Mahony admitted at the time that the basis of the story was him constructing a tale around the rumours he’d heard about Ghost Light – it shows but it’s a sufficiently different take not to be plagiaristic. Pop culture references appear, ranging through the titular Eliot quote, through the probability that the antagonists are dark versions of Sapphire and Steel, to Kate Bush and musicals. Again, for the most part these add texture, even if it’s odd having characters not from contemporary Earth making them.
Where the author’s inexperience shows is Morrison’s obvious influence. There’s a wheelchair bound scientist, a man hiding his face behind a mask and a woman called Jane who eventually goes mad – Crazy Jane. And the antagonists of the piece are avatars of the wounds time travellers cause by wiping out alternate time lines with the final battle in a metacultural engine of a city ruled by Easter Island heads named after a complex mathematical concept. It couldn’t be any more Morrison without slapping his name in the place of the author’s. Given the obvious influence, you probably could feasibly give him a co-author credit.
Unfortunately the piece lacks the absurd humour of Morrison – the tone of the piece is relentlessly nasty. The tone’s set early on with the deliberate torture and murder of a young child, and we subsequently get mental rape, knife and gun violence, cannibalistic plants feeding on cadavers and incestuously inclined villains. The novel’s climax is one of the TARDIS crew violently and graphically killing the antagonists. It’s not a pleasant read and, until this year, it was the sole New Adventure I’d never managed to re-read. There’s a certain mordant absurdity but the vestiges of humour are black in a novel already toned to a midnight darkness. O’Mahony was a teenager when writing this and it shows in the often morbid tones and wallowing in the darker side of human nature. It often feels like deliberately rubbing the reader’s face in excrement and broken glass, just to make them experience pain and degradation all at once. O’Mahony’s prose is a cut above the Who book standard, but that relative elegance feels decadent when expended on this subject matter.
My re-read wasn’t as unpleasant or onerous as I thought it would be, but that might be my memory exaggerating the general sadism, or perhaps I’ve just seen enough unpleasant things to render it a little tamer. It’s one of the few New Adventures that’s at least held up, partly due to the wider cultural frame of reference than usual and partly due to the prose. It’s just a shame about the actual tale the words tell.
If you wanted to give someone a New Adventure to confirm their worst impressions of them, 'Falls The Shadow' would be the perfect candidate. Title pretentiously stolen from literature? Check. Doctor sidelined for a long period? Check. Much angst and torturing of the regulars? Check. Obscurer-than-thou continuity references? Check. Every idea the author’s ever had chucked in? Check. In need of a tighter edit? Check.
That though would be slightly unfair. The New Adventures were tremendously exciting at the time but hindsight suggests that theirs was an uneven brilliance, more one of magnificent moments than genius sustained over novels, let alone a series. That’s the price of Virgin’s approach, of commissioning inexperienced authors to drive the series. They had youth and enthusiasm to power their way through the writing of a novel but largely not the experience to produce a consistently brilliant work as a thematic whole. Energy and imagination were the keywords. As a result they’ve largely aged badly, ideas which were new and fresh at the time now staled by cultural familiarity.
In their desperation to take charge of the series the fans turned writers were unafraid to try new things, to bring new and contemporary influences to the series in the manner initiated by the TV show’s last script editor Andrew Cartmel. Sometimes this manifested itself as continuity porn, writers delving into the parts of the show’s history they’d loved (Craig Hinton and Gary Russell the prime examples), sometimes older writers imposed older influences (John Peel, Chris Bulis and Terrance Dicks). But, as the series went on, the influences of younger authors steeped in contemporary culture came to the fore. Paul Cornell’s 'Timewyrm: Revelation' kickstarted this, clearly influenced by the more surreal end of comics in the 80s and 90s and bringing in contemporary musical and cultural references. Once the dam was burst, the references became a flood, almost a race to see how much could be crammed in.
'Falls The Shadow' largely eschews the contemporary references, and even the continuity is well chosen – outside of past stories being used to reinforces character points the references are logically chosen to add texture to the plot and root them in the Who universe (primarily 'The Time Monster' and 'Shada'). Where it’s far less subtle is in showing the roots of the tale. O’Mahony admitted at the time that the basis of the story was him constructing a tale around the rumours he’d heard about Ghost Light – it shows but it’s a sufficiently different take not to be plagiaristic. Pop culture references appear, ranging through the titular Eliot quote, through the probability that the antagonists are dark versions of Sapphire and Steel, to Kate Bush and musicals. Again, for the most part these add texture, even if it’s odd having characters not from contemporary Earth making them.
Where the author’s inexperience shows is Morrison’s obvious influence. There’s a wheelchair bound scientist, a man hiding his face behind a mask and a woman called Jane who eventually goes mad – Crazy Jane. And the antagonists of the piece are avatars of the wounds time travellers cause by wiping out alternate time lines with the final battle in a metacultural engine of a city ruled by Easter Island heads named after a complex mathematical concept. It couldn’t be any more Morrison without slapping his name in the place of the author’s. Given the obvious influence, you probably could feasibly give him a co-author credit.
Unfortunately the piece lacks the absurd humour of Morrison – the tone of the piece is relentlessly nasty. The tone’s set early on with the deliberate torture and murder of a young child, and we subsequently get mental rape, knife and gun violence, cannibalistic plants feeding on cadavers and incestuously inclined villains. The novel’s climax is one of the TARDIS crew violently and graphically killing the antagonists. It’s not a pleasant read and, until this year, it was the sole New Adventure I’d never managed to re-read. There’s a certain mordant absurdity but the vestiges of humour are black in a novel already toned to a midnight darkness. O’Mahony was a teenager when writing this and it shows in the often morbid tones and wallowing in the darker side of human nature. It often feels like deliberately rubbing the reader’s face in excrement and broken glass, just to make them experience pain and degradation all at once. O’Mahony’s prose is a cut above the Who book standard, but that relative elegance feels decadent when expended on this subject matter.
My re-read wasn’t as unpleasant or onerous as I thought it would be, but that might be my memory exaggerating the general sadism, or perhaps I’ve just seen enough unpleasant things to render it a little tamer. It’s one of the few New Adventures that’s at least held up, partly due to the wider cultural frame of reference than usual and partly due to the prose. It’s just a shame about the actual tale the words tell.
July 19, 2021
Really not sure how to rate this one. TW for a lot of violence and assault?
This is a very dark book that really didn't need to be as long as it needed to be.
Daniel had interesting ideas and I enjoyed the characters, especially the Grey man and Winterdawn seemed intriguing enough and Gabriel and Tanith were both nutcases and jane Page was well...
The Doctor was very broody in this one and didn't really do much but he was very reflective and Daniel wrote a lovely paragraph about the Doctor wishing to see through human eyes and I wonder if this is a foretelling for human nature?
I also was pleased we got more Benny and Ace friendship in this and how deeply affected Ace loves and cares for Benny, especially up to that moment where Benny gets "killed" and Ace was really upset about it.
Sometimes I want to shake the 7th Doctor when reading the Virgin new adventure novels and just beg him to take Benny and Ace on a nice trip out. To a local archaeology site, or on a pub crawl or heck, a games night in the TARDIS - just something where they’re not being put through misery constantly.
Goodness knows these two deserve a girls night out.
This is a very dark book that really didn't need to be as long as it needed to be.
Daniel had interesting ideas and I enjoyed the characters, especially the Grey man and Winterdawn seemed intriguing enough and Gabriel and Tanith were both nutcases and jane Page was well...
The Doctor was very broody in this one and didn't really do much but he was very reflective and Daniel wrote a lovely paragraph about the Doctor wishing to see through human eyes and I wonder if this is a foretelling for human nature?
I also was pleased we got more Benny and Ace friendship in this and how deeply affected Ace loves and cares for Benny, especially up to that moment where Benny gets "killed" and Ace was really upset about it.
Sometimes I want to shake the 7th Doctor when reading the Virgin new adventure novels and just beg him to take Benny and Ace on a nice trip out. To a local archaeology site, or on a pub crawl or heck, a games night in the TARDIS - just something where they’re not being put through misery constantly.
Goodness knows these two deserve a girls night out.
October 5, 2013
More a 4 1/2 star job than 5, if we're honest, but given the surprising amount of hate for this book I'm inclined to round up. An incredibly creepy story, what happens when the Hinchcliffe and Cartmel eras have a child - then realise they were too closely related and it's a terribly strange and unsettling child with a gaze that prickles your soul. Cities beyond time, houses haunted by worse than the dead, and a very thinly disguised Sapphire & Steel come to tidy up by any means necessary; this one still knocks at the back of my mind sometimes almost two decades on from reading it.
July 12, 2019
Daniel O'Mahony's first Doctor Who novel (first novel entirely) is Falls the Shadow, in the New Adventures line, and it has intriguing origins. He apparently based it on the rumors that were circulating in the 80s about the serial Ghost Light, and I was going to say it feels like a mangling of Ghost Light in premise if not result. There's a weird house that reminded me of House of Leaves. There's something buried beneath it (but that part of it falls really short). And the story is very literary in approach, but I would say it manages to be at once more straightforward and more opaque than Ghost Light. O'Mahony is a master stylist, and he produces a lot of great prose even if his themes don't always shine through and his Doctor is a big of a wet firecracker, not quite able to resolve the problem of reality crashing in on itself. Some nice meta moments, but the villains' glee at being in a Doctor Who story is eventually smothered by their sadism. I'm reminded of the controversial The Man in a Velvet Mask, O'Mahoney's First Doctor adventure which I (also controversially) liked a lot. It also had a metaphysical, underside of the universe, element, and an interest in sadism. The former is way more interesting than the latter, but it takes too long to get there. The writer was reportedly asked to cut 100 pages and a lot of the more extreme violence, but he could have cut more. Still a good read on style alone, and on the metaphysical consequences of time travel, but it wastes a lot of time on side characters, hallucinatory descriptions, and torture porn.
August 9, 2013
It's been rated very lowly over here (It's actually even one of the lowest rated ones in the entire series), but if you take a closer look at 'how' people rated it, then it becomes more obvious that it's one of the "love or hate it" kind of things.
Personally, I'm not really sure if I actally loved "Falls the Shadow", but it's certainly one of the most interesting releases in the series so far. A few pages into the story you start to notice where O'Mahony got his inspiration from and what exactly he's going for in this book. He obviously knows his Harlan Ellison and Clive Barker inside out, and it's their writing style he's trying to emulate a little, or at least form his own one after theirs. And well... in the end he's neither an Ellison nor a Barker. He surely has a wild imagination, but what he's lacking is their powerful vocabulary. So what we get here is a light version of them, which may be a bit "neither here or there", but hey, still that's something that you don't get to see in a TV tie-in novel every day. I'm not really sure if it actually works, and if someone told me that this is why the book ultimately fails I think I would understand why he sees it this way... but still, in the end I appreciate the effort. And I mean it in a good way.
That cover is pretty awful, though. And dull at the same time.
Personally, I'm not really sure if I actally loved "Falls the Shadow", but it's certainly one of the most interesting releases in the series so far. A few pages into the story you start to notice where O'Mahony got his inspiration from and what exactly he's going for in this book. He obviously knows his Harlan Ellison and Clive Barker inside out, and it's their writing style he's trying to emulate a little, or at least form his own one after theirs. And well... in the end he's neither an Ellison nor a Barker. He surely has a wild imagination, but what he's lacking is their powerful vocabulary. So what we get here is a light version of them, which may be a bit "neither here or there", but hey, still that's something that you don't get to see in a TV tie-in novel every day. I'm not really sure if it actually works, and if someone told me that this is why the book ultimately fails I think I would understand why he sees it this way... but still, in the end I appreciate the effort. And I mean it in a good way.
That cover is pretty awful, though. And dull at the same time.
February 5, 2023
A solid read that is in my eyes a better version of Strange England, whilst that was an enjoyable but okayish read this novel even tho it's bloated is completely bonkers kinda like Strange England and is what I suppose you could call 'torture porn' the amount of torture and shocks in this book is incredible. The characters even the tardis crew are really put to the test here and at times you are unsure how they are going to get out of this one.
The start was quite atmospheric with gloomy corridors and a man gone insane but soon turns into a mind-bending thriller of sorts that continues to mess with your mind until the very last chapter.
The characterization was very good in this with some very interesting elements and villains. I am now quite intrigued with The Man In The Velvet Mask if the author's other story is just as good as this one!
8/10
The start was quite atmospheric with gloomy corridors and a man gone insane but soon turns into a mind-bending thriller of sorts that continues to mess with your mind until the very last chapter.
The characterization was very good in this with some very interesting elements and villains. I am now quite intrigued with The Man In The Velvet Mask if the author's other story is just as good as this one!
8/10
October 28, 2020
I've never done an acid trip but this book gets pretty close to how I imagine one. It goes overboard on the surreal aspect, sadly, to its detriment.
Although some parts of the story were intriguing, I found much of it a drag. Yes, I can follow a convoluted plot just fine, but in this story the actual plot is quite simple. It's all the surreal window-dressing that makes it seem more complex than it really is.
A fairly loathsome cast of guest characters seem to waver between helping and hindering the Doctor and his companions, plunging them into ridiculous scenarios of fake deaths and time-tampering experiments. None of it seems to have any point and indeed the pointlessness of everything seems to be the overwhelming theme in this book.
Is there any point in this review? Perhaps not.
Although some parts of the story were intriguing, I found much of it a drag. Yes, I can follow a convoluted plot just fine, but in this story the actual plot is quite simple. It's all the surreal window-dressing that makes it seem more complex than it really is.
A fairly loathsome cast of guest characters seem to waver between helping and hindering the Doctor and his companions, plunging them into ridiculous scenarios of fake deaths and time-tampering experiments. None of it seems to have any point and indeed the pointlessness of everything seems to be the overwhelming theme in this book.
Is there any point in this review? Perhaps not.
June 11, 2011
Ever wonder what would happen if Doctor Who fell down an Alice-style rabbit hole...and ended up in a hell-version of a haunted house, with mass amounts of gross violence...and where the reader feels as if mental rape has just occurred? Read this massive head-squisher and soul-destroyer...and you will have your answer.
October 10, 2024
I read Daniel O'Mahony' s The Man in the Velvet Mask, which I quite liked, before reading this one. So, perhaps my review is skewed because I was expecting so much more out of Falls the Shadow than what I got. I have seen some other reviews, and those that favor this book try to make some justification for such a decision, with multiple qualifications. This, to me, is a sure sign that something is seriously wrong with the book. Let me start with the good things before I get to the many, many problems. O'Mahony is the most stylish writer of the New Adventures novels up to this point (late 1994). His control of language and tone is very good. Plus, if this weren't a Doctor Who novel, it might be better. That is, O'Mahony has written a modern horror novel in the manner of Clive Barker, and then shoehorned in the Doctor Who elements. This structure makes the Doctor Who elements - the characters, TARDIS, Time Lords, and other DW paraphernalia - always feel out of place. It might, therefore, have been a pretty good horror novel if left with the elements that O'Mahony created. As it is, it is a Doctor Who novel, though, and thus does not work. Here are my reasons for saying so.
1. This novel is a distinctly unpleasant read. It is 300+ pages of viciousness and cruelty without break. Thus, if it were a piece of music, it would be a one-note piece of music, a sustained dirge in chaotic harmonies.
2. There is not one character to root for or have sympathy with, let alone identify with. The inhabitants of Shadowfell, the setting for most of the novel, are all psychotic, self-obsessed, and devoid of reality. The outsiders are otherworldly beings with either dubious moral sensibilities, or no moral sensibilities. Each of these - the Gray Man, Tanith, Gabriel, the Mandelbrot set - are, like the book, all one-note. The TARDIS crew are utterly useless. Ace is reduced to angry outbursts, and the attitude of "I don't like it - shoot it," Benny goes from a whining wreck to nothing but lame, smartass quips, and The Doctor spends half the novel in a state of self-pity, and the other half spinning his wheels on plans that have no effect.
3. The plot makes no sense. Perhaps it made sense to O'Mahony, but he fails to deliver necessary connections. He does provide something like an explanation late in the novel, but it really fails to answer all the "why" questions that a reader might have. Basically, O'Mahony has created a fantasy world, but not told the reader what the rules of operation are. Without rules, things just happen. Just as a for instance, he has the character of Jason Cranleigh become a hybrid creature of all his possible selves in the multiverse, or something like that (it is never clearly explained), without any description of how it happened, or an explanation of why it happened. It is just one of the several crazy things going on in the house.
4. The villains, Tanith and Gabriel, lack motivation for their actions, and the other characters have weak and clichéd motivations. Characters just act on whatever whim O'Mahony wants to give them in the moment.
5. Pretentious chapter titles. The chapter titles are names of songs by Kate Bush, Steve Hackett, and others, or novels by J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Michael Moorcock, or movie titles, and so on. It is as if O'Mahony wants to show off his intellectual credentials. The relationship of the allusions in the titles to the contents of the chapters is, at best, loose.
I could say more, but really this is more than enough to display what is a huge disappointment. Perhaps O'Mahony had great ambitions for his first novel, but just not enough time to see them through.
1. This novel is a distinctly unpleasant read. It is 300+ pages of viciousness and cruelty without break. Thus, if it were a piece of music, it would be a one-note piece of music, a sustained dirge in chaotic harmonies.
2. There is not one character to root for or have sympathy with, let alone identify with. The inhabitants of Shadowfell, the setting for most of the novel, are all psychotic, self-obsessed, and devoid of reality. The outsiders are otherworldly beings with either dubious moral sensibilities, or no moral sensibilities. Each of these - the Gray Man, Tanith, Gabriel, the Mandelbrot set - are, like the book, all one-note. The TARDIS crew are utterly useless. Ace is reduced to angry outbursts, and the attitude of "I don't like it - shoot it," Benny goes from a whining wreck to nothing but lame, smartass quips, and The Doctor spends half the novel in a state of self-pity, and the other half spinning his wheels on plans that have no effect.
3. The plot makes no sense. Perhaps it made sense to O'Mahony, but he fails to deliver necessary connections. He does provide something like an explanation late in the novel, but it really fails to answer all the "why" questions that a reader might have. Basically, O'Mahony has created a fantasy world, but not told the reader what the rules of operation are. Without rules, things just happen. Just as a for instance, he has the character of Jason Cranleigh become a hybrid creature of all his possible selves in the multiverse, or something like that (it is never clearly explained), without any description of how it happened, or an explanation of why it happened. It is just one of the several crazy things going on in the house.
4. The villains, Tanith and Gabriel, lack motivation for their actions, and the other characters have weak and clichéd motivations. Characters just act on whatever whim O'Mahony wants to give them in the moment.
5. Pretentious chapter titles. The chapter titles are names of songs by Kate Bush, Steve Hackett, and others, or novels by J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Michael Moorcock, or movie titles, and so on. It is as if O'Mahony wants to show off his intellectual credentials. The relationship of the allusions in the titles to the contents of the chapters is, at best, loose.
I could say more, but really this is more than enough to display what is a huge disappointment. Perhaps O'Mahony had great ambitions for his first novel, but just not enough time to see them through.
Read
January 30, 2025Why did I reread this? It’s not like I don’t have a garage full of unread books, most of which I will never get around to. It’s not like I enjoyed Falls the Shadow when I read it back in 1994—I loathed it. It’s not like I sympathise with the author, who has… gone off the rails in recent years.1 When Paul Ebbs reviewed the book on Facebook last year—as part of a re-read of the New Adventures—I added a snarky post about how I thought the book was college-student-level pretentious.
Yet here we are.
Except I know why I re-read Falls the Shadow. I was twenty when I first picked up the novel. I was studying for a Bachelor's in Philosophy and English. I would go on to complete a Master's in Philosophy.2 A book like Falls the Shadow should have been a breeze to read, but it went completely over my head. That dented my ego. Having been brought up on a diet of Terrance Dick’s novelisations and Stephen King doorstoppers, I didn’t have the literary credentials to appreciate what Daniel was doing. Thirty years later, I happen on a copy and think—bugger it, let’s see what I missed if anything.
Falls the Shadow, see the TARDIS drawn to a house called Shadowfell by an unknown but powerful source. The Doctor, Benny and Ace wander around the house, seeking answers. This seems to take an eternity. Finally, the Doctor is introduced to Professor Winterdawn, whose work in interstitial time3 was defunded. It didn’t stop him from finding an entry point into the substrate of reality. Winterdawn’s project, however, has caught the attention of an assassin—Jane Page—and two all-powerful creatures, Tanith and Gabriel, who spend 90% of their time hurting people (women) for the shits and giggles.
The instincts of my twenty-something self were correct. Falls the Shadow is not very good. It’s overblown: you could cut fourty thousand words, including two or three characters, and it would still be a poor book, but a marginally better poor book. The pacing is awful, with nothing of note happening for large chunks of the novel—unless you call the torture of women a plot point. Falls the Shadow is wall-to-wall punishing, tormenting and mutilating the female characters.4
If you can ignore O’Mahony’s misogyny and the plodding narrative5, there’s something vaguely ambitious about Falls the Shadow.6 The Cathedral and The Grey Man are fascinating concepts. The latter is a member of an ancient, God-like species that imposed their Manichaean will on the first humanoids. The Grey Man introduces uncertainty into the Universe by creating the Cathedral, a metacultural engine. It’s an awesome idea, and to Daniel’s credit, it’s brilliantly realised, tinged with surrealism (including the Mandelbrot Set, Easter Island-like statue heads). All this Cathedral, Grey Man palaver went over my head in my twenties,7 but this time around, it was an imaginative break from all the women-torture at the hands of Gabriel and Tanith.8
Finally, and this is really getting into the Doctor Who neepery, O’Mahony deliberately keeps the Doctor off stage, partly so he can spend more time kicking the shit out of Ace, but mostly because, at this point, the Doctor is an all-powerful manipulator and O’Mahony wants to take him down several notches, make him feel helpless. The problem is that the Doctor becomes surplus to requirements. You could remove him, and very little would change. This isn’t a good thing given, you know, we’re reading a Doctor Who novel.
This is by far my longest review on Substack, about a thirty-year-old TV tie-in novel that few of you have read. As nostalgia trips go, this has been a weird one.
Yet here we are.
Except I know why I re-read Falls the Shadow. I was twenty when I first picked up the novel. I was studying for a Bachelor's in Philosophy and English. I would go on to complete a Master's in Philosophy.2 A book like Falls the Shadow should have been a breeze to read, but it went completely over my head. That dented my ego. Having been brought up on a diet of Terrance Dick’s novelisations and Stephen King doorstoppers, I didn’t have the literary credentials to appreciate what Daniel was doing. Thirty years later, I happen on a copy and think—bugger it, let’s see what I missed if anything.
Falls the Shadow, see the TARDIS drawn to a house called Shadowfell by an unknown but powerful source. The Doctor, Benny and Ace wander around the house, seeking answers. This seems to take an eternity. Finally, the Doctor is introduced to Professor Winterdawn, whose work in interstitial time3 was defunded. It didn’t stop him from finding an entry point into the substrate of reality. Winterdawn’s project, however, has caught the attention of an assassin—Jane Page—and two all-powerful creatures, Tanith and Gabriel, who spend 90% of their time hurting people (women) for the shits and giggles.
The instincts of my twenty-something self were correct. Falls the Shadow is not very good. It’s overblown: you could cut fourty thousand words, including two or three characters, and it would still be a poor book, but a marginally better poor book. The pacing is awful, with nothing of note happening for large chunks of the novel—unless you call the torture of women a plot point. Falls the Shadow is wall-to-wall punishing, tormenting and mutilating the female characters.4
If you can ignore O’Mahony’s misogyny and the plodding narrative5, there’s something vaguely ambitious about Falls the Shadow.6 The Cathedral and The Grey Man are fascinating concepts. The latter is a member of an ancient, God-like species that imposed their Manichaean will on the first humanoids. The Grey Man introduces uncertainty into the Universe by creating the Cathedral, a metacultural engine. It’s an awesome idea, and to Daniel’s credit, it’s brilliantly realised, tinged with surrealism (including the Mandelbrot Set, Easter Island-like statue heads). All this Cathedral, Grey Man palaver went over my head in my twenties,7 but this time around, it was an imaginative break from all the women-torture at the hands of Gabriel and Tanith.8
Finally, and this is really getting into the Doctor Who neepery, O’Mahony deliberately keeps the Doctor off stage, partly so he can spend more time kicking the shit out of Ace, but mostly because, at this point, the Doctor is an all-powerful manipulator and O’Mahony wants to take him down several notches, make him feel helpless. The problem is that the Doctor becomes surplus to requirements. You could remove him, and very little would change. This isn’t a good thing given, you know, we’re reading a Doctor Who novel.
This is by far my longest review on Substack, about a thirty-year-old TV tie-in novel that few of you have read. As nostalgia trips go, this has been a weird one.
May 7, 2019
I have to wonder about the choice of book releases by the Virgin team at this time. This came out only 3 months after Strange England and 3 months before Ghosts of N-Space meaning that around a quarter of the books in this period are weird haunted house stories. Plus we also have the gothic horror infused Evolution and the violent religious imagery in Goth Opera, Strange England and St. Anthony's Fire.
On top of this it is given an additional 25% page count when the story really doesn't require it. It just seems to stretch it out. I feel it could really have done with being delayed for another 6 months and reworked as a Chris and Roz story to see how they cope with this kind of story, rather than have Ace deal with it for the umpteenth time.
Having said all that, I am a fan of this kind of story so I still quite enjoyed what was going on. It has a very Sapphire and Steel sense to it with a lot of atmosphere and good writing. However, it also has a lot of padding and little action for a main team.
On top of this it is given an additional 25% page count when the story really doesn't require it. It just seems to stretch it out. I feel it could really have done with being delayed for another 6 months and reworked as a Chris and Roz story to see how they cope with this kind of story, rather than have Ace deal with it for the umpteenth time.
Having said all that, I am a fan of this kind of story so I still quite enjoyed what was going on. It has a very Sapphire and Steel sense to it with a lot of atmosphere and good writing. However, it also has a lot of padding and little action for a main team.
December 22, 2024
Have you even read a book, that even before you completed the first chapter, you knew you stepped onto the preverbal landmine?
This book is that bad.
At no point, did I care about any of the characters, main or supporting, in fact, I hoped as I passed the first 100 pages, I was to discover a well weaved long past April Fool's joke cleverly planted by the author. Unfortunately, this book continues with the same narrative for an additional 256 pages.
In fact, if a book is going to go past 250 pages (for a Doctor Who), then it needs to be overwhelmingly awesome, but at 356, the one star is a huge overreach.
Why did I hate this book this much? It's the extremely long point by point storytelling, but the excessive sex and violence (at one point I thought this was going to be an "Adult" novel) didn't help either.
This book is that bad.
At no point, did I care about any of the characters, main or supporting, in fact, I hoped as I passed the first 100 pages, I was to discover a well weaved long past April Fool's joke cleverly planted by the author. Unfortunately, this book continues with the same narrative for an additional 256 pages.
In fact, if a book is going to go past 250 pages (for a Doctor Who), then it needs to be overwhelmingly awesome, but at 356, the one star is a huge overreach.
Why did I hate this book this much? It's the extremely long point by point storytelling, but the excessive sex and violence (at one point I thought this was going to be an "Adult" novel) didn't help either.
June 28, 2020
Not a massive fan of this one, to be honest. There's some interesting stuff, but maybe it was a bit too soon after Strange England for another spooky manor house story with a whole bunch of grimness and violence and edgy shenanigans.
The pacing isn't great either - in the first 100 pages pretty much all that happens is Benny gets attacked by some plants and people wander from room to room basically hating one another. It doesn't really feel like it justifies its length at all, especially because it ends up basically trying to push the Doctor out of the way just to make sure the plot doesn't move along too quickly after this too. Add in some of the more grating aspects of New Adventures characterisation Ace and its just kind of a slog. all round.
The pacing isn't great either - in the first 100 pages pretty much all that happens is Benny gets attacked by some plants and people wander from room to room basically hating one another. It doesn't really feel like it justifies its length at all, especially because it ends up basically trying to push the Doctor out of the way just to make sure the plot doesn't move along too quickly after this too. Add in some of the more grating aspects of New Adventures characterisation Ace and its just kind of a slog. all round.
April 21, 2025
Very confusing and way too long. I think it's actually the second-longest VNA by 3 pages after "Warlock". I lost track of what on Earth was actually going on quite frequently. Gabriel and Tanith could have been interesting villains, but the mystery drags on too long and I still wasn't clear on what they actually were until I looked it up online afterwards. A hard read this one. Either needed to be much shorter or the bloated page count needed more answers and less questions.
February 12, 2021
Another middle of the road VNA. The story is interesting, but the author could probably have cut 50-100 pages without affecting it too much. It doesn't follow up on any previous plot lines, and it doesn't seem to lay the ground for any future ones, so I'd probably skip it on a second read-through of the series.
September 2, 2024
I enjoyed the first half much more than the last half. I can't judge this to harshly because there was a significant gap between me reading the first part of the book and the last part, so it could be a result of my reading experience, but regardless I did prefer what I assumed the premise to be from the initial setup of the book than what it actually was.
January 9, 2025
Alright at first, but once the major antagonists really make their presence felt this turns into a quagmire of upsetting violence, threats of sexual assault, and all manner of other nastiness for cheap shock value, reducing it to a dull exercise in 1990s grimdark. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/202...
August 26, 2019
Like wading through treacle. Some good ideas poorly executed as with the other one star review this sits with 'Transit' and 'The Pit' as the low ends of the series thus far.
Let's see what Jim Mortimer has for us next........
Let's see what Jim Mortimer has for us next........
March 15, 2021
Like, it's obviously a well-written book. But its a well written book in desperate need of an editor that goes on for 356 GRIMDARK pages that had me mentally shouting "END. END. END." for the last 100 of those pages.
March 26, 2024
Oh lord. O'Mahony spent too much time reading 90s Vertigo comics and Clive Barker novels. The over-the-top bleakness, the impossibly powerful antagonists, all the cruelty, it was just comical at times.
December 11, 2024
Ghost Light for The Virgin New Adventures, this is packed with heady ideas and daring visuals that, while unsettling, don't stand up to even a cursory level of scrutiny, if they're even explained in any detail to begin with.
May 22, 2019
Dark and forboding. The 7th Doctor finds time travel experiements and ends up facing two beings of incredible power.
September 11, 2020
Found it a bit hard to follow at points, and I didn't find the villains all that interesting, but I did enjoy it by and large...I just don't have much to say about it.
August 23, 2023
I'm going to be unduly harsh on this one, although I think it's slightly unreasonable to bring 2022 attitudes to 1994, when these books really bloody meant something. O'Mahony has some good character stuff for the Doctor and, to an extent, Ace, which seems to prefigure the upcoming shifts in the books' formula. And his ideas are certainly individual and varied (if unrelentingly grim). But for me there's a young, first-time writer's lack of control about the proceedings. More to the point, too many of the books lately have fallen into the trap of taking place in a simulated, parallel, semi-real, or otherwise non-traditional-physics-conforming world. It may just be poor planning on behalf of the Virgin editors. Or it may reflect the fact that these young authors - many of whom had only vague memories of the pre-Davison Doctors - were not just influenced by Doctor Who but by the more contemporary pieces such as Star Trek: TNG and The X-Files. Either way, it's becoming frustrating for multiple reasons. These virtual worlds allow for a good hothouse effect, especially when it's applied to our main cast and their endless, seething personal difficulties, but otherwise it leaves little room for variety or growth. Fingers crossed something different is coming down the pipeline.
September 19, 2011
The 'Falls the Shadow' drinking game: every time a character says 'shit'(apparently, the rudest word you can get away with in a New Adventure book) take a drink, by page 128 you will be too drunk to finish the book.
I've just done you a favor.
There are some strong characterization of the three leads, a few good ideas and nice little bits of Who history sprinkled about, but unless you've found yourself thinking 'There's not enough torture-porn in Doctor Who', this book is a huge, dreary, pointless waste of time and you wonder how the story would be any different if the Doctor and company had never shown up, as they don't seem to actually do much, except get the crap beat out of them and emotionally tormented.
It makes the mistake of thinking that adding swearing, blood, sex and violence makes for a more mature story ( known in medical circles as 'Torchwood syndrome') and something cool and innovative, when what makes a good Who book is an actual, solid story, doing stuff that the BBC TV budget could never afford and having the room to let the characters breathe and do more.
This is tied with 'Transit' and 'the Pit' on my list of worst New Adventures.
I've just done you a favor.
There are some strong characterization of the three leads, a few good ideas and nice little bits of Who history sprinkled about, but unless you've found yourself thinking 'There's not enough torture-porn in Doctor Who', this book is a huge, dreary, pointless waste of time and you wonder how the story would be any different if the Doctor and company had never shown up, as they don't seem to actually do much, except get the crap beat out of them and emotionally tormented.
It makes the mistake of thinking that adding swearing, blood, sex and violence makes for a more mature story ( known in medical circles as 'Torchwood syndrome') and something cool and innovative, when what makes a good Who book is an actual, solid story, doing stuff that the BBC TV budget could never afford and having the room to let the characters breathe and do more.
This is tied with 'Transit' and 'the Pit' on my list of worst New Adventures.
July 15, 2025
High-concept and I mean ‘really’ high-concept. Maybe too much? I did get confusing towards the end. When I first started reading I thought, “oh! A country house in the woods that appears perfect but isn’t what it seems. We’re doing Strange England again?” But to be fair, both those stories are completely different. I did find a lot of the ideas in this book very interesting, but not always well executed. The novel has this; is there only black and white in the world or is it just grey? And they demonstrated this with a literal character called Mr Grey.
It was a very mean spirited book in places with some body horror. Some of the imagery was quite something. Did need a synopsis to understand what I had read for certain parts. Overall I did enjoy the ideas of the book, but this isn’t the best Doctor Who story in the world.
It was a very mean spirited book in places with some body horror. Some of the imagery was quite something. Did need a synopsis to understand what I had read for certain parts. Overall I did enjoy the ideas of the book, but this isn’t the best Doctor Who story in the world.
July 15, 2012
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1960139...
There is a format that works much more often than not for Doctor Who: take an isolated building, and develop beyond the usual base-under-siege story by making the inhabitants a collection of strange indiviuals each with their own hidden motivations. Ghost Light on TV, The Chimes of Midnight on audio, last year's New Who book Dead of Winter are all good examples; so is Falls The Shadow, a Seventh Doctor story in the New Adventures range featuring Ace and Bernice Summerfield, which runs through changing topography, off-stage sex, weird androids, temporary deaths, and mysterious travellers in a satisfying and well-written text. Seemed a bit longer than most in this series, but maybe that was just my frame of mind.
There is a format that works much more often than not for Doctor Who: take an isolated building, and develop beyond the usual base-under-siege story by making the inhabitants a collection of strange indiviuals each with their own hidden motivations. Ghost Light on TV, The Chimes of Midnight on audio, last year's New Who book Dead of Winter are all good examples; so is Falls The Shadow, a Seventh Doctor story in the New Adventures range featuring Ace and Bernice Summerfield, which runs through changing topography, off-stage sex, weird androids, temporary deaths, and mysterious travellers in a satisfying and well-written text. Seemed a bit longer than most in this series, but maybe that was just my frame of mind.
November 27, 2014
"I travel in time. The mere fact of that is enough to erase hundreds of futures. Wherever I go I leave footprints, my testament. There's your pain - the scream of infinite futures erased from the cosmos" - page 346.
The novel is perhaps a bit longer than it needs to be and things do start to get a little repetitive, but Falls the Shadow is a nice little thought provoking adventure for the Doctor and company. Certainly, if you are a fan of Moffat's 'destruction-of-reality/rebooting-reality' storylines then you will probably enjoy this book.
The novel is perhaps a bit longer than it needs to be and things do start to get a little repetitive, but Falls the Shadow is a nice little thought provoking adventure for the Doctor and company. Certainly, if you are a fan of Moffat's 'destruction-of-reality/rebooting-reality' storylines then you will probably enjoy this book.
July 31, 2012
Good characterization and intriguing ideas offset by a running-around-a-scary-house plot that goes nowhere.
January 18, 2016
Muddled epic features high concepts, but boring prose. Way too much exposition and not much of an ending either. Bad cover too.
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