Short Trips: Seven Deadly Sins, ed. David Bailey

Aug 17, 2016 18:48

Second paragraph of third story ("Angel", by 'Tara Samms' [Stephen Cole]): The lights stay on at night, shine in your eyes, you can't sleep. When you fall to fatigue at last they wake you and feed you pills that snag in the throat.
I wasn't all that satisfied with the previous anthology in this series, but I felt this was on much firmer ground - one story for each of the first seven Doctors, with linking material featuring the Eighth, and although the stories' themes are linked, they are also different. The least successful was the first, "The Duke’s Folly" by Gareth Wigmore, which seemed to me to have the First Doctor and companions way out of character. "Angel", by 'Tara Samms' [Stephen Cole], with the Third Doctor and Jo, is gloomy but well-written. "Suitors, Inc." by Paul Magrs features the Fourth Doctor, the second Romana, Harry and Sarah and gets very silly perhaps at the expense of plot, but it is fun. Also fun but much better controlled is Rebecca Levene's "Too Rich For My Blood", in which she demonstrates her knowledge of poker (she was working on a book about it at the time this story was written) and also of the Seventh Doctor, Benny and Chris. So all in all, a decent jumping-in point if you want to sample this series.

Next in this sequence is Short Trips: A Day in the Life, edited by Ian Farrington.


doctor who, doctor who: 04, writer: paul magrs, bookblog 2016, writer: david bailey, doctor who: 01, doctor who: 07, writer: stephen cole, writer: rebecca levene, doctor who: 03

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