Stories Book Target Collection Doctor Who and the Web of Fear 1 image Overview Characters How to Read Reviews 2 Statistics Related Stories Quotes Overview Released Thursday, August 19, 1976 Written by Terrance Dicks Publisher Target Books Pages 127 Time Travel Present Tropes (Potential Spoilers!) Base Under Siege, Body Possession Location (Potential Spoilers!) Earth, England, London, London Underground Synopsis Forty Years the Yeti had been quiet. A collector's item in a museum. Then without warning it awoke - and savagely murdered. At about the same time patches of mist began to appear in Central London. People who lingered anytime in the mist were found dead, their faces smothered in cobwebs. The cobweb seeped down, penetrating the Underground System. Slowly it spread.... Then the Yeti reappeared, not just one but hordes, roaming the misty streets and cobwebbed tunnels, killing everyone in their path. Central London was gripped tight in a Web of Fear... Read Read Favourite Favourited Add Review Edit Review Log a repeat Skip Skipped Unowned Owned Owned Save to my list Saved Edit date completed Custom Date Release Date Archive (no date) Save Characters Second Doctor Jamie McCrimmon The Great Intelligence Yetis Victoria Waterfield Edward Travers First Appearance The Brigadier Show All Characters (7) How to read Doctor Who and the Web of Fear: Books Doctor Who and the Web of Fear Reviews Add Review Edit Review Sort: Date (Newest First) Date (Oldest First) Likes (High-Low) Likes (Low-High) Rating (High-Low) Rating (Low-High) Word count (High-Low) Word count (Low-High) Username (A-Z) Username (Z-A) Spoilers First Spoilers Last 2 reviews 3 May 2025 · 796 words Review by Newt5996 Terrance Dicks in novelizing Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen he largely wrote it to include Buddhist philosophy closer to actual beliefs than what made it on-screen in Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln’s scripts, as well as being able to generally improve the pace and depth of the story. It very much showed that Dicks could novelize a story that he had no involvement with on television, something that would eventually cement him as the main novelist for the range through much of the 1970s and 1980s. His second commission for a story he had nothing to do with was Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster early in 1976, but it was a no brainer that after Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen Dicks would be brought back to novelize The Web of Fear into Doctor Who and the Web of Fear. Now, this is another one of those novelizations that only would have had the scripts to work off, until 2013 most of the serial was missing apart from the first episode and this was even before the audit of the archive to see what survived. Now the tricky part about talking about Doctor Who and the Web of Fear is that adding depth was something Dicks set out to do with Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen because it was a serial that desperately needed it, but The Web of Fear on almost every level is a stronger serial. Dicks very easily could have gotten the scripts into prose format and called it a day much like he would do with later novelizations mostly due to overwork, and 1976 was very much a busy year for Dicks, between Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster and this Dicks had done Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen and Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks. Instead of phoning it in, Dicks actually approaches Doctor Who and the Web of Fear with the intent on making it work as a book, using the pacing of a film almost as a blueprint for the way things are paced. The depth added here isn’t the same kind of depth as Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen, outside of renaming the rather unfortunate Jewish stereotype in the first episode to be less so. Some of the events in the first half of the story are rearranged to flow better into one another, the misunderstanding between Victoria and the Travers’ in particular is softened and from Victoria’s perspective so the audience knows just how nervous she has been in particular, and the Doctor actually has a part to play in the adaptation of the second episode. This is the second novelization that Target had done that was adapting a story where a regular was missing from an episode, the first being Gerry Davis’ adaptation of Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet which was only hastily rewritten to accommodate William Hartnell’s illness. Dicks adds an in depth sequence of the Doctor meeting and coming to trust Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, complete with the omniscient narrator reflecting on how this will grow and what will become UNIT will become a bigger part of the Doctor’s life. The novelization even ends with the suggestion being made off-handedly to form a sort of military organization to deal with alien threats. Dicks as a novelist is also desperately having to compensate for the fact that he cannot emulate Douglas Camfield’s direction onto the page. This isn’t without trying, Dicks is using the scripts after all and the first chapter is a great little horror story adapting the early scenes of the Yeti coming to life, and then that quickly spiraling out of control. It wasn’t necessary to add the pieces on how long it took for the invasion to actually come in full force and brief touching on Travers being suspected in it, but it was very much appreciated. Dicks knows when to compress and when to expand because he cannot emulate Camfield’s style in prose, he’s writing very much for the action and not the horror. Dicks doesn’t really excel at horror, but the tension is there and the mystery while still probably the weakest aspect is there. The exasperation of the story still comes through with how the characters behave. Overall, Doctor Who and the Web of Fear is an excellent novel, it would have been at least enjoyable if Terrance Dicks had phoned it in, but he doesn’t. There aren’t really plot additions, but Dicks actually had the time and care to look at how he could translate the story from the screen to the page while capturing why this was one that stuck in people’s minds for so long even when it turned out to be nearly entirely missing. 9/10. Newt5996 View profile Like Liked 0 4 January 2025 · 18 words Review by Rock_Angel Target novels back to being amazing wow such a good adaptation I was fully hooked listening to it Rock_Angel View profile Like Liked 0 Open in new window Statistics AVG. Rating22 members 3.73 / 5 GoodReads AVG. Rating505 votes 3.85 / 5 Member Statistics Read 46 Favourited 4 Reviewed 2 Saved 1 Skipped 7 Related Stories Other adaptations of this story: We define an adaptation as a recreation of a similar story but on a different medium or with different characters. Classic Who S5 • Serial 5 · (5/6 episodes intact) The Web of Fear Rating: 3.88 Story Skipped Television Reviews(10) More Actions View Sets Close Related Sets Set of Stories: Doctor Who Season 5 Set of Stories: Doctor Who (1963-1996) Set of Stories: Second Doctor Add Review Edit Review Skip Skipped Unowned Owned Save to my list Saved Quotes Add Quote Submit a Quote