Review: Doctor Who: Goth Opera by Paul Cornell

Mass market paperback, 238 pages
Published 1994

Acquired and read December 2017

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures: Goth Opera
by Paul Cornell

This is a sort-of sequel to Terrance Dicks's Blood Harvest, the most recent New Adventure I read, so I interrupted my readthrough of those novels to pick it up. Paul Cornell does much better with the basic ingredients of vampires, Time Lord cults, Romana, and so on than Dicks did, though I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. Cornell is a thoughtful writer with a knack for characterization, and that serves him well in the Missing Adventures; you can hear Peter Davision saying the lines, and his Nyssa is pretty good, and his Tegan excellent.

This book is less thematically complicated than Cornell's NA work, but it makes for an enjoyable-- well, romp isn't exactly the word for a book where a stadium full of people is massacred, but maybe you get what I mean. It's a sold sort of Buffyesque modern vampire adventure with some inventive ideas. I like the hints about Time Lord history, and the explanation for vampires, faith, and garlic in a Doctor Who context. The idea of vampire/Time Lord hybrids marching on the universe is a great Doctor Who idea, and there's even foreshadowing of the Last Great Time War. I've never been terribly into the Missing Adventures (or BBC Books's Past Doctor Adventures), but this is an above average example of the form.

The Sabalom Glitz cameo is pretty random. And I say this as a devoted fan of the character. Cornell writes a delightful second Romana, though.

Next Week: That's it, I'm all caught up on reviews of The New Doctor Who Adventures, so I'll be rotating onto Transformers comics once more, beginning with the universe's most dysfunctional robots in More than Meets the Eye, Volume 6!