Love and Monsters: The Doctor Who Experience, 1979 to the Present |
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Published: 2012 Read: February 2026 |
This scholarly monograph has a topic that is kind of hard to put into a few words (hence the not-very-descriptive subtitle), but basically it's about how Doctor Who became a fan-driven thing. What happened as Doctor Who shifted into being written and created by fans, and written and created for fans? Booy takes as his jumping-off point the debut of Doctor Who Weekly (later Doctor Who Magazine), which cultivated an audience of people interested in the mechanics of television production. Over time, these people came to write for the tv show, thus shaping it from the inside—and eventually they ended up running the whole thing once the show returned in 2005! The subtitle says "to the present" but really Booy is interested in the final decade of the classic show, which is covered in a series of detailed chapters.
I found this a quick and easy read. Some "aca-fan" stuff is awful, either bad scholarship or bad fandom, but Booy is good at both. This is clearly written by someone who knows fandom from the inside but also knows how to bring the rigor of critical analysis to it... but also someone who can write in an engaging, accessible way. It's a little digressive at times, but overall I enjoyed it; Booy has a unique angle and executes it well.
(Booy cites the work of Australian media critic Alan McKee, pointing out in a footnote that McKee himself had a short story published in DWM back in the 1980s. Shortly after reading Love and Monsters, I happened to copyedit a journal article that cited McKee... I guess he has also published on Australian aboriginal horror film!)
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