This review contains spoilers!
📝8/10
Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!
This time: The Doctor goes ghost hunting!
MY SCATTERED AND TOTALLY IRRELEVANT NOTES:
The Haunter of the Shore immediately establishes a chilling atmosphere with its eerie manor setting, stormy weather, and spectral appearances. The story follows a young Thomas Carnacki investigating mysterious deaths at a manor in 1897, alongside the enigmatic Doctor posing as a local hermit. The narrative quickly brings these characters together—Carnacki’s curiosity, Rebecca’s grief, and the Doctor’s intrigue—against a strange and otherworldly force of alien origin.
The plot balances traditional library research (deciphering an alien language) with the chaos of temporal storms, which bring echoes of alternate timelines into the present. The confined setting and tight focus on the alien presence and temporal storm work well, especially as they connect to a future version of Carnacki, adding an intriguing layer to the story.
Rebecca’s grief over her late husband is touched upon, but this aspect lacks depth and feels underexplored.
As the story progresses, the convergence of different timelines leads to a somewhat convoluted resolution. The reveal of the alien presence, while serviceable, feels overly familiar and doesn’t quite deliver the payoff one might hope for.
Despite its flaws, the atmospheric setup and focused storytelling make The Haunter of the Shore an enjoyable, if not groundbreaking, tale.
MrColdStream
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