Faces wearing different dreams: Doctor Who - The Nightmare of Black Island

I finally read a New Series Adventures Doctor Who novel. They've only been printed since 2005. To be honest, I've avoided them because of their reputation as being written for younger readers while I'm used to the novels of the Wilderness Years which were written, generally speaking, for older fans. And by "older" I mean adults of whatever age. Reading a book aimed at, say, 12-year-olds, just held little interest for me. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that kids have Doctor Who books written for them. This just meant I'd be sticking with my EDA's and VNA's and whatnot.

Truth be told I've meant to try an NSA for a while and have occasionally bought one only to have it sit and collect dust until I made the decision to put in my local Little Free Library. This time I bought one resolved to actually read it. It took some time to get previous literary obligations done and dusted but I finally did the deed.

If I recall correctly, I bought The Nightmare of Black Island last fall and because it was written by Mike Tucker. I very much enjoyed the PDA's with the 7th Doctor and Ace that he and Robert Perry wrote and had just finished re-reading Illegal Alien in anticipation of hosting a panel discussion on the alternate season 27 that their novels comprised. Since that didn't happen I decided to expand my Tuckerian horizons.

To begin, it wasn't as simply written as I had feared. While it read more like a Target novelization than anything from the Wilderness Years - like it was written for boys in their early teens - it turned out not to be the subject-verb-object nightmare my mind had conjured. Tucker's style seemed to limit the number of settings and was more simplistic than his previous work with, for example, him ending a chapter by describing the baddies as they rip off their masks to reveal hideous alien faces underneath before noting "Miss Peyne and al the warders were aliens!" Still, there was an occasional paragraph that would have been at home in a PDA.

The setting, the I presume fictional rural Welsh village of Ynys Du, is filled with bad vibes and less than welcoming residents and has been seen before on TV although Justin Richards' PDA Grave Matter immediately came to my mind. Tucker does a good job of making it a creepy place. Most kids probably missed the inside joke of a character named Bob Perry. The Doctor on the page comes off as being much like his counterpart on TV though much less of a spaz, which I greatly appreciated. Tennant-lite, if you will. Rose seemed to be very Rose-like as she went off on her own a lot and proved quite capable, overall. Plus she wasn't afraid to give the Doctor a ration of crap.

The villains were archetypal aliens that would be twirling mustaches, if they had them, although their situation was a bit more complicated than just a gang of aliens seeking to destroy the Earth. There's a lot of grotesquerie here with a colony of seals being slaughtered by monsters conjured from the dreams of Ynys Du's children and there's a brutal beheading too. There were definitely times when it seemed like Tucker strayed from a remit to write for younger readers and came up with stuff for an older audience only to be reined in again.

This book did not encourage me to run out and buy more NSA's but it was a good, fun, and quick read. I will likely investigate the NSA's further and try to find another one to read.