28 - Blood Harvest

Sometimes all Doctor Who needs to be is fun.  Blood Harvest doesn’t have a strong theme or allegory guiding it, it doesn’t push the envelope with experimentation or lore changes - and yet it’s an absolute blast anyway!  I think that’s what “Uncle” Terrance Dicks does best; some damn good Doctor Who that does something familiar but fresh.

We begin with a flashback to the 4th Doctor, who discovers a way back into E-Space after leaving Romana and K-9 behind in Warriors’ Gate.  I’ve been enjoying the little scenes of past Doctors at the beginning of the last couple novels; they add some fun context to stories that continue the narrative of a classic serial.  The main action of Blood Harvest is split into two sections - while the Doctor and Ace infiltrate Chicago’s criminal underworld, Benny meets the mysterious Lady Romana on a planet once dominated by the Three Who Rule.  In a sharp left turn that reminds me of the twists in NuWho finales, the Doctor is caught up in a Gallifreyan conspiracy to capture the evil being Agonal and use him to topple Rassilon.  Borusa helps the Doctor to imprison Agonal, and Romana decides to stay on Gallifrey (which may sound familiar if you’re a Big Finish fan).  Dicks does a great job keeping the plot fresh, as Agonal’s meddling slowly becomes apparent on Earth at the same time that Benny and Romana unravel the same mystery at its other end.

If I had to nitpick something (and it would be nitpicking, because this book was a blast), it’d be that the two plots don’t really connect until close to the end, and there doesn’t seem to be much motivation behind the specific settings.  It seems to me that Dicks wanted to make both a thriller about the Mob and a sequel to State of Decay, and decided to do both at once and bind them together with connective tissue.  If those individual stories weren’t so strong, it would be easy for Blood Harvest to come off as clumsy or directionless, but I think the novel pulls it off well.

I mentioned above that the last few VNAs have been including scenes with earlier Doctors, as if to gauge the audience’s appetite for a run of past adventures.  In Blood Harvest, this run has finally arrived, with a “reverse cliffhanger” leading into an unseen 5th Doctor story called Goth Opera.  I’ve already read Goth Opera as I write this, and it’s absolutely excellent.  I totally recommend reading both this novel and the accompanying Missing Adventure as one package - they still work as separate adventures, but are greater than the sum of their parts.

Onward to Strange England!

Mixed feelings on this one. I enjoyed the overall plot, especially everything with Romana and Benny, and I liked a lot of the political maneuvering in the Chicago side of the plot. However, Dekker was a flat, annoying character to me, I really wasn't a fan of some of the ways Ace was characterized, and the misogyny got quite grating. I also found the climax to be a bit rushed.

Content warnings for violence, gore, death, attempted rape, and the use of a racial slur.

Say what you will about uncle Terry, fella knows how to make a story entertaining, his simple and very easy to read prose makes this book fly by, the plot is interesting, I found the 2 split sides of the adventure (the Vampire world and Chicago) to be fun, each time we’d switch perspective I’d be excited to get back to the other while still enjoying the one I was on, the issues with this novel stem from the really … stupid decisions the antagonist makes? And the very devs ex machina ending, don’t get me wrong I love a good Gallifrey story and it was nice, but man…. It just felt so rushed and weird. Overall a very easy read which I can’t say about most VNAs!