Virgin Missing Adventures #21- "The Eye of the Giant” by Christopher Bulis

There are a few writers who’ve gained a rather prolific status amongst fans through their efforts in the Wilderness Years book series. There’s Paul Cornell, who was the poster child for the Virgin New Adventures, and Steve Lyons, who wrote for all four major series and has gone on to be an incredibly popular writer in various forms of expanded media. And then there are oddities like Christopher Bulis, who, despite writing more books than most other Wilderness Years authors, is barely talked about in fandom. His main playground seemed to be the Virgin Missing Adventures, where he wrote five out of the thirty three novels released and, if this book is anything to go by, that means at least 15% of the series is terrible. There is a reason the fandom doesn’t remember Christopher Bulis it would seem, because The Eye of the Giant is atrocious.

Tracking the history of an alien artefact, the Doctor and Liz become trapped on a mythical island forty years in their past. As they become embroiled in history, the Brigadier and UNIT attempt to stage a rescue attempt whilst combatting a slate of UFOs worldwide.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

I did not like The Eye of the Giant. For the most part, it was fine, a solid 6/10, but the final third absolutely destroyed any hope it had for me. Christopher Bulis is a writer I have a lot of problems with, and I’ll get onto those, but first I do want to level some praise at the one thing he truly, properly gets right - characters. Every single character here is solid. Starting with our returning cast, the characterisation for every single one of them is so well realised it takes zero effort on my part to visualise the actors. The dialogue genuinely feels straight from the lips of Pertwee, Morris and Courtney sometimes and that really heightens my immersion personally. As for original characters, they’re pretty much all great; my particular favourites were Amelia and Marshal Grover, their relationship and personalities both felt particularly unique to me and enjoyed pretty much all their scenes. But poor Marshal man, he already blames himself for the death of his wife and loss of his daughter’s arm, and in his attempt to mend that guilt he inadvertently causes the (sort-of) death of his daughter and second wife. He’s never getting out of therapy, is he? As for our antagonists, we have a pretty uninteresting giant called Brokk kickstarting all the wild events in this book with magical serum that causes mass gigantism - he’s not the deepest adversary. And then, we have Nancy Grover, who genuinely might be one of the most detestable characters I’ve ever seen in a piece of media. Hats of to Bulis for making me hate this person so much, she is f**king dreadful and easily the better villain here

So, we’ve established that Bulis’ character work is easily his best strength, but characters do have to have a story to run around in and, if that fails, so too does the book. The story here isn’t perfect, far from it, but I can say that I did enjoy myself for around the first two thirds of the book (I will get onto why the final third faltered in a minute). The plot switches between The Doctor and Liz on the island and the UNIT troops trying to get them back to their own time and whilst the former is a fun but ultimately dull affair I found the latter sections to be the most interesting part of the novel. UNIT is an organisation who we rarely saw work, the formula would be that an alien menace would show up, they’d try to shoot them with bullets, the bullets wouldn’t work, and the Doctor would have to come swanning in to save the day. Not here though, we get to see a UNIT operation in action and see them actually problem solve as a military company, which is infinitely refreshing after this entire group played second fiddle to the Doctor for four years. As for the rest of the book, like I said before, it goes downhill massively after a certain point, but before that it is a simple but somewhat fun little story that reminds me of old universal monster movies, with giant crabs attacking the ship and a giant petrified by the cold. It’s not spectacular by any means, but it’s passable.

What I can not call passable however is how this book is written. Bulis’ prose is genuinely abhorrent, where he excels in dialogue he digs himself a grave trying to write the bits in between. Clunky and overly technical, Bulis seems to fail at the most basic of writing skills and very often will just tell us exactly what a character is thinking instead of letting us work it out for ourselves. You know how you were taught to show not tell in primary school? Well clearly Bulis skipped those lessons. It’s like he thinks his readers aren’t smart enough to infer anything and everything has to be spelled out. And don’t even get me started on the rhetorical questions. He uses rhetorical questions a lot and, instead of using them to ask the reader something, to engage them and let them think, he writes out thoughts that the reader should be thinking, literally trying to tell you how you should be experiencing his book. Do you know how insulting it is to be told what thoughts you should have on the piece of media you are currently experiencing? (By the way Bulis, that’s how you use a rhetorical question). Not to mention how the final 30% of the book utterly drops the ball. The story ends around 215 pages into this 315 page book, Brokk is killed and the Doctor and Liz are returned to their proper time. This is executed very abruptly and unsatisfyingly by the way, having two hundred pages end in a short description of Brokk blowing up before the Doctor and Liz very quickly and safely run away. But, despite this logically being where the story should end, since we have nearly every plot thread concluded, it keeps going. Now, suddenly, it’s an alternate timeline story, with Nancy becoming ruler of the world through the use of Brokk’s alien technology. This entire plot does not work stapled onto the end of what is very clearly a different book, and so feels underbaked, uninteresting and a waste of time. A world ruled by a single narcissist enforcing her image onto every person in the world is a good idea, but we see so little of it because it comes at the very end of a separate novel. This whole sequence is complete padding and entirely unnecessary fluff. Not to mention it then ends again when Nancy is killed, but then Bulis feels the need to mutate her into a nightmare creature boat-hybrid who is then defeated by Amelia, who has turned into an angel, because she took an alien serum with the ability to further the plot. It’s boring, a waste of time, and a weird ending that doesn’t land at all. Not to mention the whole thing’s just dull, I get some enjoyment out of the antics in the first half but it gets tired quickly and there’s so little tension throughout that it just hurts to read it.

I read The Eye of the Giant for two reasons. One, because it apparently leads into the much better received The Scales of Injustice and two, because I wanted to get a taste of Bulis’ writing, since he was so omnipresent in the books. And whilst I’m happy I can now read The Scales of Injustice, I’m unhappy knowing I’ll have to read another Bulis at some point. An insulting read that is composed mostly of pointless fluff that hides a few strengths, but all of which are overshadowed by the painful writing and boring story. An absolute void of a book.

4/10

Pros:

+ Characters are generally well written, especially our returning cast

+ Interesting look into the inner workings of UNIT operations

+ Nancy was a despicable antagonist

+ Good fun for around 70% of the book

Cons:

- Appalling written from a technical stand-point

- Barely has a plot for most of the runtime

- Ends 100 pages from the final line

- Has multiple anticlimaxes

- Little to no tension throughout

- Changes plot two thirds into the book

- Final moments were unnecessary