Hunter’s Moon

Hunter’s Moon, by Paul Finch, is a novel which seems to predict a genre of story which becaming quite prevalent a few years after it’s publication in 2011.

It’s, basically, the 11th Doctor, Rory and Amy dropped into The Running Man but without the ‘gameshow’ trappings and actually with more elements familiar, now in 2023, from other films and TV series most notable The Purge series, The Hunt, Escape Room and Squid Game. It’s about a group of innocent people being kidnapped and forced to run for their lives whilst being chased by wealthy businessmen intent on killing them for sport.

It’s an unusual sub-genre of horror for Doctor Who to be based on as, really, it’s a terrifying concept.

Rory ends up in the ‘game’ after losing a bet in an alien casino. Amy goes undercover as a ‘hostess’ and the Doctor as a mercenary who joins the hunt. A family from Earth also find themselves kidnapped and dropped into the game and are the heart of this tale.

For me, this novel was very much a game of two halves. The hunt is thrilling and Rory, in particular, gets lots to do. Amy is sidelined a little but still gets to do a bit of sneaking around and standing up to the bad guys. The Doctor is a terrible mercenary but his ‘transmat gun’ is a fun idea as it allows him to look like he’s exterminating people when in actuality he’s transporting them back to the planet (the game occurs on an abandoned moon).

I really enjoyed the hunt scenes. Unfortunately the aliens behind the hunt – the Torodon – aren’t particularly engaging. They have a plethora of silly names and it became increasingly difficult to tell them apart. They also spend some of the book vying for power and double crossing each other which meant I completely lost track of who was who.

The Doctor being old friends with the planet’s chief of police is a oft-used trope but is actually played quite well with the chief being both unwilling and unable to help the Doctor because of the corruption in their society and because he doesn’t consider the Doctor the most reliable of people either.

Thankfully, Finch chooses to centre his guest cast of ‘people the Doctor needs to save’ around a human family (rather than adding even more alien names into the mix). Harry, Dora and Sophie Mossop are a dysfunctional family dealing with unemployment, depression and teenage rebellion who are broken down and built back up by their experience in the game. Harry, a washed up policeman redeems himself quite spectacularly and the dynamic of all three is something I can easily see as a reflection of the TV series and is the part of this story which best emulates the modern series.

A rather thrilling climax atop a transmitter tower and a clever denouement with a powerful magnetic field seeded earlier in the book actually make this a satisfying read even with the frustrations I had identifying the various alien baddies.