This book spends its first thirty pages Doctorless and introducing us to a million side characters who will all be dead by the end. I hate it when DW novels do this - they almost invariably give me no reasons to care about the side characters and I am rarely sad to see them go. The Face Eater is no exception.

It's not a bad book, exactly. I just didn't enjoy any part of it. Sam and the Doctor head to a pioneering human colony world led by tight fisted ex-military Helen Percival. I rather suspect we were meant to think of her as a domineering bitch but I find that kind of woman hot so I liked her. In fact, she was basically the only character with a personality that wasn't just a tired stock trope. We have Fuller, the world weary detective, and Leary, the misunderstood hero, and after that I stop remembering names.

And then we have the Doctor and Sam who are basically just there. The Doctor is off having a jaunty old time getting beaten up and hanging out with the telepathic natives of the world while Sam gets lusted over by a 40 year old man for some reason and has, yet again, a very bad day. Neither of them seemed to be that relevant to the story and both spent a sizeable amount of time hospitalised, immobilised, and broken.

The world itself is an interesting one - Messingham insists upon introducing every character with their full name and racial identity which paints us a picture of an incredibly diverse world. Men and women seem equal in jobs and society. Everyone is pulling towards the same goal. But for all the interesting potentials there, the story may as well have been set on Earth in the 90s. It gave no flavour of otherworldliness.

This perhaps sounds more negative than I feel, but in truth I feel very little. I will, in all likelihood, forget about this book very quickly, except for one conclusion: for a book called The Face Eater, basically nobody got their face eaten. What a false promise.