Invasion of the Cat-People

Somehow at the same time bland and too experimental.

Has too many ideas: A god-like race that uses sound for everything, A weird sub-dimension where mentally broken people come to recuperate, A ghost house filled with books that whose pages change the flow of time.

Oh, and cats.

The Doctor, Ben and Polly land near a mansion in 1994. They discover a group of students and teachers that are trying to hunt ghosts. Trouble arises, however, when one of the teachers turns out to be a stranded, godlike alien that can use song to alter time and space. The alien, called Thoorsun, is conspiring with cat-people to destroy the earth and use its power to return home. However, conspiring with cats is never easy….

Trying to summarize this story reinforces exactly what the problem with it is: It’s has loads of ideas, but it doesn’t spend a lot of time on laying the groundwork. It just keeps pushing. One moment we are focused on the fate of musical deities from the dawn of earth, the next we are dealing with alien cats in a ghost mansion. It isn’t really presenting ideas as much as just chucking them at your head.

Let’s look at the 2 points the story really needed more of: Flow and character goals. First up, flow. As mentioned, this story is very idea heavy. The problem is that the ideas don’t build on each other very well. There is some mild connection between events, but it always feels very flimsy. At the beginning of the book, the writer tells us about a tarot reading he had done so he could use it in the story. After that, he tells he used the outcome of the reading for his ending. Basing it quite literally on the luck of the draw. And you get the feeling that the same mentality was used for the rest of the book. It just jumps around and does what it feels like. The godlike beings can do anything, so they don’t have to explain! We can just talk about aboriginals for a while! Or travel to the middle east without a time machine! It is all perfectly logical because we are dealing with gods! It would have helped if the book held the readers hand a little.

A great way to let the reader in, is by giving the characters clear goals. Sadly, this story has very little of that either. All character goals are too simplistic for the ideas on display. The humans want the earth to remain intact. The cat-people want power. The god-likes want to go home by any means necessary. You’d expect that last group specifically to have the clearest goals and ambitions, because they are basically the main characters, but except for the main villain, they keep their cards close to their chest for a long time. So there is very little to latch on to there either.

So what does that leave you with? Well, it is basically a book full of ideas but devoid of flow and structure. It keeps readers in the dark for a lot of it. Sometimes by design and sometimes by accident. This makes it noticeably hard to follow the story or even to care about what is going on.

And that’s a shame, because the ideas are not wrong! Nothing in the book is wrong. It’s just poorly structured. The idea of the sound aliens is great! The travels in ancient Baghdad are fun! Ben and Polly go to 90s McDonalds and reflect on how times change! None of these ideas are wrong. They just don’t stick together.

Which is what makes “Invasion of the cat-people” so frustrating. The plot is thrown together, so the ideas don’t land. I want to say that more time would have helped its concepts flourish, but it feels like it is missing something basic. Which makes the total package very frustrating. Maybe its ideas will inspire other writers and lead to new, engaging stories, but for now that feels like a nothing more than wishful thinking.