Nightshade

by Mark Gatiss

The Doctor and Ace end up in the village of Crook Marsham in 1968. The Doctor contemplates retiring and Ace falls in love with local boy Robin Yeadon. in a nearby retirement home, Edmund Trevithick,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0426203763
• ISBN13: 9780426203766
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Carol Publishing Corporation
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 4.3" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Best Who novel ever!

This one set the bar for Who novels. Written in 1992, it still is the ultimate Who book. Read this book and be scared, sad, and disturbed. The Doctor's behavior in the last few pages is sad and says a lot about who he is as a person. If you read any Who book, read this one!

Creepy, suspenseful, spooky, scary... perfect

This is one of the best Doctor Who novels ever written. It's tightly written and superbly paced. The characters are crafted well, and the baddies are - well, the baddest. It is a genuine atmosphere story if there ever was one. Read this, and you will get the heebie-jeebies. It's fantastic.

NAstalgia

NIGHTSHADE is quite a fun romp. The book is a bit cliched and predictable in places, but such a solid adventure that it's quite easy to excuse its flaws and simply appreciate it for the enjoyable escapade that it is. The characters are very well drawn and the setting fits perfectly with the story that's being told. If you're in the right mood for this sort of thing, then you'll find it to be a complete delight.There are quite a number of Doctor Who cliches present throughout the story. Thankfully, Mark Gatiss has the good sense to set up many of them slightly differently than we're used to, so that the majority are not particularly annoying. Still there are moments of predictability and a few sections suffer because of their lack of originality. The ending in particular is a bit of a disappointment, as it feels jerky and uneven after the smooth and slow build-up. On the other hand, the beginning and middle sections feel deceptively comfortable and safe, which would most likely be a deliberate ploy, given the theme running through the story that highlights the dangers of nostalgia. Those who dwell too much on the past will be doomed to have no future (by having their souls eaten by loud, slobbering nostalgia-monsters, one presumes). Although the theme is hit a bit too loudly at a few points, for the most part it makes a nice backdrop.The town and the characters that inhabit it are fairly stereotypical of the average sleepy English village, but for what the story was attempting, they work perfectly. Despite the relatively large number of people mentioned, most of them are given enough brushstrokes to seem realistic. The back-stories provided are quite effective and excellent at showing how the past continues to live on in the present. There are several nice touches that subtly demonstrate the link between then and now that thankfully manage to stop well short of beating us over the head with the imagery. The retirement home, the graveyard, the old semi-abandoned church, and the monastery are all quite successful at establishing this. And, of course, the most blatant reminder of one's past comes in the form of the TV serial, Nightshade, and the actor who portrayed the title character.Fortunately, Mark Gatiss chose to use Quatermass as the basis for his television nostalgia-fest rather than the Doctor Who television show itself, thus sparing us from a lot of silly fandom in-jokes (the Professor X gags would come from elsewhere and become less funny with each passing reference). The sections featuring Edward Trevithick, the actor who had played Professor Nightshade, are far and away the best parts of the book. Gatiss obviously had a great affection for this character. He gets the most interesting background, his part of the story is the most exciting, and he certainly is the character with the most depth.NIGHTSHADE isn't the best Doctor Who story out there, but it certainly one of the more enjoyable ones. For a fairly standard story it packs a surpris

Old TV series never fade away...

England, 1968, and Edmund Trevithick is a retired actor, best known for his lead role in the science fantasy series, 'Nightshade'. The days of fighting imaginary monsters are long gone, and Edmund has settled down in a sleepy village. And then the Doctor and Ace arrive, the lines between fact and fiction get blurred, and Trevithick finds that 'Nightshade' is more like nightmare...The publishers of Doctor Who novels finally realised that there was really nothing to their story arcs (Timewyrm and Cat's Crucible) that really warranted having them, and so a new era of more-or-less stand alone novels kicked off with this one - and a very good choice too, its an absolute corker!Mark Gatiss has gone on from this to not only write a number of very good Doctor Who novels, but to co-author and star in the wonderful 'League of Gentlemen' series and, indeed, play the Doctor himself.This novel is often wonderfully understated and gets deeply into the emotions of the characters, which is quite important to make the science fiction-horror elements come to life.Hey, stop reading this review and order it!