#58
Fear Of The Dark
By Trevor Baxendale
I can see why they reprinted this one. Fear Of The Dark is a gloriously self-contained monster story: only the faintest idea of Doctor Who is needed to follow it, and even then Trevor Baxendale puts in enough little details about the three regulars that you could easily catch up.
Nyssa is having bad dreams. (So is Tegan to be fair, but that’s another story. Baxendale places this one just before her Mara relapse in Snakedance. These things are like buses, clearly.) A darkness is coming to get her, stirring up memories of Traken and her father’s death. It’s a very evocative, even disturbing start: “It inserted itself like a dark finger into the sheet … There was something in her room with her. Something that breathed … As the blemish crept up towards her, so the shadows gathered around her, above her, behind her … She sat, blind and paralysed with fear. Then something in the darkness touched her.”
This same force guides the TARDIS to a moon where they encounter a supposed archaeological dig. Of course the only thing that hard-nosed Stoker, gentle giant “Bunny” Cheung and their associates are looking for is wealth. They find unexpected signs of civilisation instead — doors in the dark — and soon, in true Doctor Who style, the bodies start piling up.
There are some fun little flourishes here, such as the way the Doctor and co. are already ensconced in the action from the start and then we pay out the scenes that led them there, or the fact that Stoker and co. don’t automatically suspect the TARDIS crew of any wrongdoing, mercifully allowing the story to get on with it rather than go the usual route with tedious false accusations. (Which would be era-appropriate if nothing else.) In the main though Fear Of The Dark is straight down the line storytelling, very easy to follow and positively relishing its A-to-B “who’s going to die next?” horror.
As to the horror elements, Baxendale is often one for body horror and there aren’t many opportunities for that here, with much quicker deaths sparing us the irradiated realities of The Janus Conjunction or the “see title” unpleasantness of Eater Of Wasps. There is still a monster on the loose and when we eventually see its vampiric attack (clearly he had “Stoker” on the brain) it’s a more brutally efficient one than any Nosferatu I’ve seen. A less corporeal monster lurks in the shadows and leans more into the spooky horror that would later inform the Vashta Nerada — however it’s still startlingly visceral up close, with one victim “breaking apart in the Doctor’s arms as his bones shattered and his skin tore. Blood gushed out like water over the cave floor.” There’s horrifying collateral damage as well, with one man getting horribly burnt in a spaceship crash but not dying right away, and another having his throat torn out.
The book isn’t like this cover to cover: it’s mostly a case of creeping around in the dark and worrying about what’s coming next. Baxendale does a good job of keeping up the tension, despite the plot essentially traipsing back and forth between the same few rooms and caves. There are neat little touches such as his likening a journey through a forest of stalagmites and stalactites to a shark’s ever-tightening jaws. And there are ways to unsettle the characters without monsters, such as mind games, as the psychic force wraps its tendrils around Nyssa (“I am always with you. Sleeping with you” — ick) and tortures people with visions and insecurities. I wasn’t certain how much of this was “The Dark” and how much was common or garden neuroses — not that such uncertainty is a bad thing. Nyssa and Tegan for example both have cause to suspect that the Doctor might prefer the other; Tegan’s observation seems particularly apt given her brief (at least from her perspective) absence from the TARDIS. This could be the Dark, or it could be occurring by itself. But then you’ve got upsetting dreams of Traken, an apparent future vision of Turlough, and one of the more revolting manifestations of regeneration in print, including a fairly accurate Sixth Doctor bursting out of his predecessor’s corpse.
Quite why the Dark wants to muck about psychically like this was never entirely clear to me, nor the reason that its coming would be a fate worse than death — in practical terms it still seems to be death, albeit a horrible one that perhaps takes a minute or so longer than say, a fatal gunshot wound. Baxendale puts a good deal of effort into the Dark’s oogly-boogly history, making it a compelling “horror from the dawn of time”, but when it comes to specifics (and crucially when it finally gets some dialogue) it’s prosaic territory, all “conquer the universe” and “you will die, Doctor!” Fear Of The Dark is on much more effective ground when it’s getting under its characters’ skins, for instance Tegan remembering a hated old tree that would tap at her bedroom window only to notice something much less benign doing the same thing now.
The characters are a fairly solid bunch, with a strained but believable romance coming through for two estranged lovers-turned-enemies. Some minor figures barely manifest beyond their first names (“Jim” and “Nik” mainly register for their failed attempts to creep on Tegan and Nyssa) while others endear themselves very nicely, only to get aggravatingly killed off anyway because it’s just that sort of “bloodbath” story. (Although let’s face it, anyone saying “All I know is that when this operation’s over, I’m off back to Earth and my family for good” is marked for death.) There’s also a pseudo-antagonist who might have rather more benign intentions than you suspect at first, but insists on behaving like a complete a-hole anyway, presumably to throw the reader off the scent. His righteous indignation later on doesn’t convince.
Baxendale has a good grasp of the Season Twenty crew at the centre of it all, observing that the Fifth Doctor “was hiding something behind all that courtesy.” Fear Of The Dark pushes him towards that “gentleman running out of patience” manner we saw at the end of his run, especially when he demonstrates why live rounds would be a mistake in pitch darkness. There’s a sure to be contentious moment when he feels so hemmed in by the Dark that he considers a murder-suicide bid, but there’s enough ambiguity to suggest that it’s not entirely his choice. (Elsewhere Tegan notes that “It wasn’t like him to be so taciturn” and side character Stoker clocks something that “didn’t sound like the Doctor at all.”) I don’t think the Fifth Doctor’s occasional coldness here is based on nothing at all, but this is clearly at attempt to push it to breaking point.
That aforementioned competitiveness simmers between Tegan and Nyssa, which I thought was a clever and unexplored area; the famously grouchy Tegan ought to show some signs of actually wanting to be here after her return in Arc Of Infinity, and her insecurity here highlights that nicely. Baxendale still has a bit of fun needling her temper and argumentativeness, such as: “‘How about you, Tegan? How have you been feeling?’ ‘Now you mention it, I’ve been feeling pretty irritable and cranky ever since we arrived.’ ‘As I said, it doesn’t seem to be affecting you very much at all.’” But what I mostly took from it was a sense of “what can she do now that she’s back,” which seemed a smart choice at this precise point in her telly run.
Nyssa is perhaps the casualty of the three. For much of the book she falls under the Dark’s influence, albeit in an “if you know, you know” way rather than cackling maniacally, which is a subtle little thread worth highlighting. Other characters forever seem to be asking how she’s feeling, and she’s generally feeling pretty lousy, which takes her out of the action to some extent; when what we have left is knowingly ambiguous viz “alien influence” there isn’t a lot of room to get a feel for Nyssa’s actual character. Even the Traken nightmares don’t take us very far into her psyche, as we’re simply not asking about that stuff very much.
Ah well. It’s still interesting to be asking any questions about Nyssa’s inner turmoil which so often went unexplored on screen, and we do a bit, like when Tegan observes that a young girl’s father has been murdered by an evil force and Nyssa thinks the girl might be better off never knowing about it. Fear Of The Dark is so focussed on its grim rewards that it felt like a treat to get these character moments at all — from the outset it seems like the sort of story that will throw the lot of them in the mincer, Horror Of Fang Rock style. As with a lot of horror it’s somewhat machine-like but undeniably well-oiled.
7/10
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