#10
The Hollow Men
By Keith Topping & Martin Day
This one caught me off guard.
The ingredients are all fairly typical. You’ve got a creepy village with some even creepier scarecrows, some none-too-wholesome villagers in between. All very “British horror movie”, with an eventual link to a Classic Who story to calm the fans. But The Hollow Men feels more rounded than the jolly genre exercise I expected. It is also, for the people excited by the mere mention of horror, a good deal nastier.
The Doctor has been intrigued by Hexen Bridge for some time. This is a mild retcon, but it wouldn’t be the first time this particular Doctor has revealed a body-hopping interest in a place or a thing. Besides, I like the idea that we’re not privy to all of his adventures, and the suggestion that he’s been intrigued by a town very near Devil’s End ever since Jon Pertwee’s Favourite Story (TM), but has been unable to put his finger on exactly why, puts him at a curious disadvantage.
That wrong-footed feeling stays with the Doctor for most of The Hollow Men, despite his efforts. And we see some of them, such as his visits to the town throughout its history. He was on the school board some years ago, in a couple of different guises it seems, and several of the villagers remember him to some degree. This is a level of familiarity you don’t normally see around the Doctor — especially this Doctor — and there’s a vulnerability in that, because the people who remember him are not as awed by him as newcomers tend to be.
Well, he’s waited long enough, and it’s time for answers. But before he can get any he comes across some particularly nefarious locals (one of whom knew him at school) and they bundle him into a car and off to Liverpool for seeing too much. Again, you sort of expect the Seventh Doctor to wheedle his way out of something like this — it’s a car full of normal people, for goodness sake! — and there might be something to be said here about misreading the character. But I think he’s deliberately written out of sorts. He’s confused by the behaviour of these townspeople he sort of, kinda likes. He’s not one step ahead of what’s happening in Hexen Bridge. Why shouldn’t that mess up his routine?
(Just to be clear, I know this was originally intended as an Eighth Doctor novel, so some of that behaviour probably wasn’t meant to juxtapose against the great chess player of Doctor Who. But it’s his book now, and I think it juxtaposes nicely, so if you don’t mind I’ll behave like all humans according to the Eighth Doctor and see patterns that aren’t there.)
Something is definitely iffy about Hexen Bridge, and some of it is just the sort of thing you’d expect. We open with a horrific flashback to not long after the Civil War, with a mad judge executing all the men in the village — clearly a precursor to some very bad things. Later there are glimpses of nightmarish rituals involving people in hoods (well obviously, you gotta have hoods) and what about all those scarecrows hanging about? But there’s an atmosphere here that goes beyond all that. The people aren’t quite right.
A good example of this is Rebecca, a schoolteacher and daughter of the local vicar, whom Ace quickly befriends. Rebecca stands up for the younger girl against the fairly awful pub landlord, and you can tell they’ve hit it off. But when looking at the creepily identical handwriting of some local kids, Ace notices Rebecca’s is just the same. Later, she turns out to be sleeping with the extremely toxic Matthew Hatch, a young politician of some standing with grand evil plans just out of sight. (Think Roger ap William in 73 Yards.) How much a part of Hexen Bridge is she?
That’s a question asked throughout the book, and of course, there’s no easy answer, as the people seem to go back and forth. Something is poisoning the villagers’ minds and ensuring their cooperation. (It is also ensuring a degree of population control — see, rituals and hoods.) This manifests locally in a level of mistrust and violence, mostly aimed at strangers. The Chens moved here to open a restaurant, and the local publican keeps making racist attacks against them. To be fair (well, not fair, he’s a racist) his wife is sleeping with one of them. But even his relationship with his wife seems on-again-off-again, love-hate in a way that’s not quite right, even with the infidelity. Why does she stay with him? How much does she want Steven Chen? Is that Hexen Bridge, or are some people just a bit inexplicable?
Further afield, this strangeness manifests in the schemes of Matthew Hatch, as well as the crimes of his less charming classmate Shanks. It’s mainly these crimes that ensnare the Doctor, forcing him to enter a club strapped with explosives so he’ll plant drugs on an unsuspecting policeman’s daughter, or else. (I expected a clever bit of sleight of hand would get him out of this, but although he does use his smarts while his captors aren’t looking, it doesn’t work. This results in a grimly funny moment where he tries to defuse the bomb by remembering what Ace has taught him about explosives, which is another unexpected moment of vulnerability, him needing her like that.) This whole Liverpool section seems an unusual fit at first, and maybe it is, but the earthy violence of it and the general atmosphere of crime and urban horror — not to mention the laboratory revulsion of Hatch’s plans — made me strangely nostalgic for the New Adventures, so I didn’t mind.
Back in the village, Ace is exercising her social justice muscles to defend the Chens. This is all very Ace, although it amuses me that it was presumably almost Sam. (I think Ace is her closest on-screen equivalent, and likely a major inspiration, hence a certain ease in swapping them out.) There’s a certain I-don’t-give-a-damn experience to Ace in this, which makes sense after the fairly traumatic TV stories set before this one. She seems indomitable in a way many companions aren’t in the absence of the Doctor, even sort of deputising Steven Chen as a companion for a bit. She seems to win people over in that Doctor-y way. Ace does some investigating in his absence — she knows him well enough not to panic when he seems to have just wandered off — and she gets to more closely observe the scarecrows. Lucky her, eh?
It’s surprising really that there aren’t more creepy scarecrows in Doctor Who. The ones in The Hollow Men are nightmarish indeed, being (spoiler?) converted villagers, slaves to the force underneath Hexen Bridge. Like a lot of great monsters there is a sadness to them, as they seem at least dimly aware of what they used to be. Topping and Day don’t make a very big thing of them, despite what the front cover suggests. (Never bet on the front cover.) This sort of heightens the horror when they do appear, and keeps them from feeling overplayed. Besides, the real horror of The Hollow Men is the effect the town has on its people. It’s predominantly not a “monster” story. (Good. I thought the weakest part of The Devil Goblins From Neptune was the goblins. Maybe the authors felt the same way and deliberately shifted the focus away from the monsters? Or maybe not. You know humans, patterns and all that.)
When the violence really kicks off, which it does increasingly through the second half and then like mad near the end, it’s horribly indiscriminate. Some quite nice people end up dying, and at least one certified bastard doesn’t. This seems to speak to the authors’ interest in the murkiness of people, which is also enhanced by the relative absence of aliens and monsters.
The finale is another thing that (probably by accident) made me nostalgic for the New Adventures, since it is (forgive me) all a bit metaphysical and weird. The Doctor confronts the malevolent force in a strange representation of Hexen Bridge found through a mirror, while in the real world scarecrows battle other supernatural manifestations for the souls of the villagers, who are themselves going mad with random violence. (RTD voice: “Marvellous!” Seriously, if you told me this one was written five years earlier I wouldn’t blink.) But it ends on a genuinely sombre note, even apart from the locals living in the wake of chaos, as we see that the Doctor still doesn’t understand these people. It’s not that he was outplayed by a master chess player — the alien intelligence isn’t that intelligent. It’s just that too many humans can make things harder to predict. (Possibly. That’s my reading anyway. Patterns etc.)
For me it’s a good sign to finish a book and still want to turn it over in my mind. The nature of villainy and the apparent difficulty the Doctor faces made The Hollow Men an interesting experience. If I can climb over the (imagined?) 90s-ness of it that I so enjoyed, however, it is a bit messy. Pulling the action apart across the country feels a smidge random, and the finale (for all its earned, “here’s what you paid to see” excess) does go on a bit. The characters are also a bit thin, but maybe that’s a deliberate thing and they’re supposed to be a bit weird and unknowable? It’s a story with unease hanging in the air, even when it’s just me wondering how many people in Hexen Bridge know the Doctor in a dull way like as an old half-forgotten teacher (because how weird is that), so even when it doesn’t entirely work I still want to look at it and wonder what that’s about. Before running away, obviously, from those bloody scarecrows.
7/10
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