The Fourth Doctor Novelisations: The Stones of Blood (2011)

The last Target novelisation of a fourth Doctor story was 1991's The Pescatons; the last of an actual television story, 1983's Meglos. The fourth Doctor's era was not completely novelised at this point, in that there were two Douglas Adams tv stories with no novelisations, The Pirate Planet and City of Death, but with the rights to those up in the air, the novelisations of Tom Baker stories were seemingly over.

But the 2010s gave us something new:* the renovelisation. As AudioGO released a series of audio readings of Target novels, there were a few circumstances where they didn't do readings of the original Target, but commissioned readings of newly written (or edited) texts. The first of these was 2011's The Stones of Blood, where instead of doing a reading of Terrance Dicks's Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood (1980), original tv writer David Fisher was commissioned to produce a wholly new novel for audio. I guess technically this was not a Target novelisation, but in 2022, it became one, when the text of the new reading (edited, apparently, to play to the strengths of the page) was released as part of the Target range by BBC Books.

Doctor Who: The Stones of Blood
by David Fisher

Originally published: 2011
Acquired and read: January 2025

What is the point of a novelisation? As I read through these books (as well as some of the new series ones; I did The Church on Ruby Road [2024] a couple weeks back), it's a question I find myself thinking about a lot. In 1980, the answer was obvious: Terrance Dicks, no matter how slim his work, let you experience a tv story you otherwise had basically no way of experiencing. But now we have the story on DVD. So why do we have a novelisation of it... much less two?

The thing Doctor Who fans seem to have glommed onto in novelisations is these little bits of business, moments of backstory that we can get in prose but not on tv without lumpen exposition. Clearly David Fisher was told this when Michael Stevens approached him with the commission. The book opens with a chapter about the history of standing stones at the story's heart, the Nine Travellers, and the mysterious women who always pop up around them; we also get an interlude about the functioning of Justice Machines. On top of this, there are little bits of history for various characters; the ones that popped out to me the most were the ones for very minor characters, Martha Vickers (a member of the cult) and Pat and Zac (the campers who randomly get offed by the Ogri in the middle of the story when they need some blood to recharge). The one about Martha is fun; we learn she joined the British Institute of Druidic Studies because she's tired of singing "Jerusalem" and find that the orgies make it more fun than meetings of the Women's Institute! We even learn that her father was a hunter but also a conscientious objector who refused to sign up during World War II. The one about Pat and Zac is surprisingly detailed; we even learn the names of their pet cat and dog!

Do we need all these bits? Do they make the story "better"? Well, I think that depends on what you mean by "better." If I never had them, would The Stones of Blood be worse? No... but did I find them fun? Well, yes. There are lots of cute little discursive bits built into this, but Fisher manages to not overwhelm the text with them.

Beyond that, how does this work as a novelisation? I don't think I've seen The Stones of Blood since I was in high school (so about two decades ago), when I watched the complete "Key to Time" season, but my main memory of it is finding all the stuff all the stuff with the Justice Machines in hyperspace pretty tedious. Reading the book, I found all this material zippy and charming! I don't know if it was cut down or punched up, or if it's just that the performances and effects of the tv story made their banter ponderous instead of the rapid-fire way it reads on the page. It's still a bit of a weird swerve, to be honest, but the novel gets away with it in a way that's not quite true of the tv version, I think, where the two halves of the story are so different. I don't know how Dicks's effort at this story was (and I never will), but I found this a fun and enjoyable read.

The 2022 BBC Books edition contains a foreword from David Fisher's son, Nick, that's a tribute to his father, who passed away in 2018. (Tragically, Nick—himself a tv writer—passed away from a drug overdose just a month after the book came out.) It's a good read, and I learned a bit about David, a man I otherwise knew nothing about; he found it "strange and a little uncomfortable" that despite a lifelong writing career that included novels and his own tv programmes, he was most famous for Doctor Who. But he must not have been turned off, otherwise he wouldn't have done this, much less come back for a second one!

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara

* Plus, of course, the not-Target novelisations of those two Tom Baker stories, which were eventually abridged into Targets.