🙏🏼C-Baker → Fine!

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark is the third and final novel in the Cat's Cradle trilogy of the Virgin New Adventures, penned by debuting author Andrew Hunt.

What an interesting piece of Doctor Who prose, and written by a veterinarian, no less!

The early parts of the novel jump around a lot, introducing a lot of characters and settings in quick succession. It blends fantasy, sci-fi, and contemporary storytelling very confusingly, and it takes a while for the story to settle down.

The story soon settles into a strange sci-fi fantasy with Seven and Ace and a crime thriller with Inspector Stevens and the two American tourists back on Earth. At the same time, the husks of the Doctor and Ace return to our world and begin taking over the people (nothing much comes out of this, or the religious cult stuff, for that matter).

This isn’t a masterpiece by any means: the prose is readable but not overly vivid; there are a lot of typos; and the pacing is a bit off at times, especially in the middle, which drags, and the end, which goes way too fast. Seven and Ace are very well written, and the human supporting characters are good (mostly Inspector Stevens and the two American backpackers). Hugh is annoying, and there's one random human who suddenly appears in the second half but does nothing of value). The fantasy characters all blend into each other and aren’t very interesting, with the exception of Bathsheba.

The fact that there are so many characters doesn’t help at all, because they easily get lost in the mix. What was going on with Bats the unicorn? Or the weird time stuff with Herne?

Interestingly, I find the parts with Stevens much more interesting than the parts with the Doctor. I found it somewhat hard to grasp the old Celtic folklore stuff and the fantasy elements built around that.

This has been brought up before, but the book has nothing to do with the Cat’s Cradle arc. It’s very hastily wrapped up in the final chapter (after the chatty build-up to the climax, which is overstuffed but surprisingly huge). Fortunately, they scrapped this overarching arc idea with the next book, because both the Timewyrm arc and this one have barely been any arcs at all.

The fantasy elements bring a unique little flair to this, and I like how it’s inspired by Celtic folklore. What bothers me a bit is how the fantasy elements are less and less present in the story as it progresses, and, in the end, it all turns out to be sci-fi all along. Granted, I didn’t see the twists in the final quarter coming, but they didn’t feel very original when stories like The War Games or the recent 15th Doctor novel Caged have done similar things.

Generally, I like Witch Mark. It’s built on fun ideas, but it’s a bit sloppily written and suffers from too many characters and some padding. It’s definitely the most enjoyable of the Cat’s Cradle books for me, though. And considering it’s the debut novel for someone who never aspired to be a writer in the first place, it’s a pretty solid, official piece of Doctor Who fanfiction.

Interestingly, Andrew Hunt claims he doesn’t like The Lord of the Rings, yet he inserts a couple of very obvious hobbit references into his book.

I also found the character of Dr. Snape to be very distracting, because I strongly associate that name with Harry Potter.