#45
Eater of Wasps
By Trevor Baxendale
Yuck, obviously.
We’re three novels deep with Trevor Baxendale — at this point you can tell what he likes. Body horror, with an emphasis on degeneration. The Janus Conjunction and Coldheart both concerned worlds in a state of decay, with the inhabitants getting the worst of it. Eater Of Wasps continues that theme but on a much smaller scale: instead of alien planets it’s Earth, and instead of a planet-wide problem it’s a spot of bother in a quaint English village in the 1930s.
The spot of bother is, to be fair, revolting. Local wasps have somehow become intertwined with an alien artefact, causing them to swarm into people’s mouths and noses with the aim of controlling them. (We don’t go into that much detail but suffice to say it’s a “gestalt intelligence that causes genetic mutation” kind of arrangement, not “wasps driving people around like in Ratatouille”. Sadly.) This gradually causes human bodies to disintegrate, leaving a bizarre new life form in their place. If the Doctor doesn’t stop it then it will take over and/or kill everyone on Earth.
The difference in scale is a bit disorienting. Eater Of Wasps more closely resembles a nightmare version of Agatha Christie than Baxendale’s usual brand of sci-fi. This at least makes for a fun juxtaposition, and he accelerates the plot in a way you couldn’t do in a true period piece. Horrible wasp deaths occur early and more or less in plain view, the alien intelligence apparently having no truck with subtlety. Okay, it’s trying to take people over one at a time, and it successfully creates at least one spy, but otherwise it’s not doing a very good job of staying out of the papers. There is a “man vs wasp monster” set piece on top of a moving train at one point.
The downside to the smaller scale is a corresponding lack of plot. There’s no great mystery to unravel in Eater Of Wasps. There’s an alien weapon causing all the ruckus, but the people responsible for it are dead before we even get started. All that’s left is to stop the main host, Charles Rigby, before he starts sharing the love outside the village. (Once he goes “full monster” he ceases to be interesting. We are talking “calls the Doctor Doc-torrr.”) There is a secondary threat at least, a team of time agents sent to retrieve the weapon before it takes effect, or destroy the entire town to ensure it never does. This creates a bit of tension with the TARDIS crew and it eventually adds a ticking clock in the finale, but there’s nothing really to unpack there either; it’s not as if it’s very surprising, for instance, that the possibility of a bomb going off becomes a race to defuse it in time. They’re quite mysterious as a group, which at least creates the possibility of following that up in later books.
Is it so terrible for a book to skimp on the plot? Well, no: excitement is its own reward, and there’s a good amount of that here. The aforementioned train sequence might be a transparent effort to get us that bit closer to 280 pages but it’s still a good bit. (Equally obvious but less good is the bit where the Doctor and co. get arrested.) There’s not a huge amount here besides the plot, though. The denizens of Marpling have a certain degree of colour and back story, such as a local rogue and a young boy with questionable parentage, but most of it fails to ignite. There’s a critical relationship for example between Rigby and the boy: it’s enough that the wasp-addled man is still on some level trying to protect his friend. But what’s actually so important there that it transcends species? It’s not made clear, especially where young Liam is terrified into silence for most of it. (And no, Rigby is not his secret dad — but wouldn’t that have been an idea?)
The future people aren’t much better. Kala is sufficiently dimensional that she considers asking the Doctor for help rather than just going through with her contingency plan. By the end of the book she’s flirting with the possibility of joining him in the TARDIS, and it doesn’t sound all that implausible. (Hell, he must have said yes to Compassion.) The other two are for various reasons less interesting, and their modus operandi is a bit hard to fathom. Sorry, I know they’re from thousands of years in the future and time travellers be aloof and all that, but nuking Britain in 1933 is going to have big enough consequences that they might feel it too, despite their casual attitude here. Presumably they have ancestors who would be better off without any radioactive fallout? Or suddenly not existing at all due to the paradox? (The whole nuclear bomb threat feels like an easy reach for extra peril. And why does it have to be a nuke?)
The closest the book gets to Doing A Thing (character-wise) is with the Doctor, specifically the callous way he is sometimes perceived, especially by Anji. “‘Pity about the plants.’ ‘Oh yeah.’ Fitz nodded sardonically. ‘Terrible shame.’ He couldn’t remember the Doctor even passing comment about the death of Tom Colton.” / “‘Anji’ll be wondering where the hell we’ve got to.’ The Doctor just glanced at Fitz for a moment, almost as if he was trying to remember who Anji was.” / “No wonder you were so keen for us to go! You were worried about the flipping fragment, not me!” / “[Gleave] found the Doctor’s clinical detachment rather disconcerting; he couldn’t detect even a shred of sympathy.” / “He doesn’t care, though, Fitz. He does the things he does simply because he can, not because he really cares. It’s just something for him to do. Like a distraction, or a game.” / “All that sympathy for a few crushed wasps, and not one mention of Hilary Pink. Taking care not to risk harming the monster that Charles Rigby had become, but allowing him to keep Liam Jarrow hostage.” / “I just wish you’d get a bit more involved sometimes.”
Anji, and the various other characters in the mix there are not exactly wrong: the Doctor can appear flippant. He can be very interested in mint humbugs but not all that bothered about a dead man. The thing is though, it’s not exactly a fresh take on the character — and Eater Of Wasps barely does anything with it anyway. So he’s a bit aloof. So what? There’s an autopsy scene in this, and the mortician is aloof too. Besides, the Doctor clearly does care about stopping Rigby from doing more harm, or from becoming a monster with no way back. Anji gets a few opportunities to grouse about this but, like Liam, she also spends a chunk of the story as a mute hostage — not exactly time well spent. Then when she puts him on the spot at the end it’s easily dismissed: despite complaining that he misled the alien intelligence that was trying to kill them all (oh, what a bounder!) she is able to live with it after all and so nips off for a bath. It’s a bit of a nil-nil draw, characterisation-wise.
Plot and character are pretty threadbare, then. (I’ve barely even mentioned Fitz. Reader, he puts in the legal definition of an appearance.) What Eater Of Wasps does unequivocally have going for it is of course that Baxendale standard, the yuck: people falling apart, nasty things happening to them. He’s clearly landed on something good (I use the term advisedly) with the invasive wasps. It’s an arresting and unpleasant image, no doubt… but that’s sort of it. Not only is the horror of wasps-in-your-mouth repeated so often that it threatens to become normal, it doesn’t then speak to anything else, since the wasps are technically benign and they don’t have much of a plan. They don’t feel representative of something. And it never evolves into something greater or more horrible, apart from Rigby turning into your standard monster-man at the end. I frequently had the image of Baxendale spotting a wasp crawl into someone’s mouth and trying to spin a whole novel out of just that. The relative complexity or world-building of The Janus Conjunction and Coldheart is missed.
I’m aware that expectations such as complex plotting, thoughtful character work or identifiable themes are relative to the reader and potentially quite unfair, since most readers aren’t in the silly position of reading all the books in order, or even just reading lots of Doctor Who. They might not want or need that much variety, a bit of grisly fun like this might hit the spot just fine for a casual reader — it wouldn’t be the first time that they’ve aimed to produce just that. Eater Of Wasps has a similar skill for pacing to something like Vanishing Point, and it would make another decent showcase for Doctor Who stories that deal with monsters and whip along in good order. I enjoyed it in the moment. It’s just that, since we’re bringing it up, Vanishing Point also had unrealised potential. Eater Of Wasps has an icky front cover and novelises it.
5/10
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