I am currently on a mission to complete the Virgin range of Bernice Summerfield New Adventures. I have had these books for 25 years and am only now getting around to completing the series. I love Benny as a character but with so many different book ranges, I used to skip from range to range but, with being a slow reader (and easily distracted by many other things) I have just fallen further and further behind.

The last novel in this range I read and reviewed was The Mary-Sue Extrusion and I hated it. Possibly the worst Doctor Who-related book I’ve read. Wilfully obscure and not even featuring Benny until past page 200, it was a chore to read.

I was wary, therefore, going into Dead Romance. Written by Lawrence Miles and openly not featuring Benny at all, I was worried I was in for a similar experience. I have found Miles’s books to be quite up and down. I loved Alien Bodies but Interference was overblown and overlong.

It was good to be pleasantly surprised and find myself thoroughly enjoying Dead Romance.

The book follows the life of Christine Summerfield who discovers she exists in a bottle universe on an Earth which is due to face the apocalypse in October 1970. She discovers this when she meets Chris Cwej who has been sent by the Time Lords (who are never named as such but we know who they are). He is to prepare the way for them to take over the Earth in this bottle universe as a way of escaping the emergence of the Gods in the main universe (as seen in the last couple of Virgin novels).

The novel is told through the conceit of Christine’s journal entries which makes for a chatty, pacy read with plenty of jumping back and forth between events. Christine is a fun character to spend time with and I also adore Chris Cwej so that helped to make this an easy read.

Miles is also excellent at evocative imagery both of Christine’s London and of the various strange worlds they visit outside of the bottle. The cast of characters is small – Christine, Cwej and Khiste (a ‘colleague’ of Cwej’s) are the only ones of any real note. The Horror is less a character and more a concept as it descends above London to devour everything in its path. It is the amalgamation of all the lives lost in the vortex and will hugely disrupt the Time Lord plans to take sanctuary in this bottle universe. Christine manages to defeat it with rock, paper, scissors.

Now that may seem rather anti-climactic but actually it really works and Miles manages to cleverly use Christine’s fear and humanity to give the outcome a little twist. Having recently watched Squid Game 2 which features a similarly desperate game of rock, paper, scissors it really did feel like a fitting denouement.

Although this story doesn’t feature Benny or the Gods – or indeed any of the main cast of the Virgin New Adventures – it still feels far more tied into the overall story arc than The Mary-Sue Extrusion did. Seeing the impact of the events from Where Angels Fear really works to show the true extent of what is happening.

Is this revelation of Christine’s true identity a little bit of an anticlimax? Possibly, but it does also fit with the depiction of the Time Lords as heartless higher beings intent on preserving their own lives at the expense of any other life forms (which is further emphasised by what happens to those who survive on the bottle universe’s Earth once the Time Lords invade). It doesn’t particularly do Chris any favours but he has always been depicted as a man often at the mercy of his own naivety and belief in others so, again, it is consistent.

For a book I was rather dreading, it was good to find myself enjoying the story, the characters, the world building and the overall style of the book. A book which is difficult to recommend in isolation, it is still a good example of Miles on form with this writing.