Why did I reread this? It’s not like I don’t have a garage full of unread books, most of which I will never get around to. It’s not like I enjoyed Falls the Shadow when I read it back in 1994—I loathed it. It’s not like I sympathise with the author, who has… gone off the rails in recent years.* When Paul Ebbs reviewed the book on Facebook last year—as part of a re-read of the New Adventures—I added a snarky post about how I thought the book was college-student-level pretentious.

Yet here we are.

 Except I know why I re-read Falls the Shadow. I was twenty when I first picked up the novel. I was studying for a Bachelor’s in Philosophy and English. I would go on to complete a Master’s in Philosophy.** A book like Falls the Shadow should have been a breeze to read, but it went completely over my head. That dented my ego. Having been brought up on a diet of Terrance Dick’s novelisations and Stephen King doorstoppers, I didn’t have the literary credentials to appreciate what Daniel was doing. Thirty years later, I happen on a copy and think—bugger it, let’s see what I missed if anything.

Falls the Shadow, see the TARDIS drawn to a house called Shadowfell by an unknown but powerful source. The Doctor, Benny and Ace wander around the house, seeking answers. This seems to take an eternity. Finally, the Doctor is introduced to Professor Winterdawn, whose work in interstitial time *** was defunded. It didn’t stop him from finding an entry point into the substrate of reality. Winterdawn’s project, however, has caught the attention of an assassin—Jane Page—and two all-powerful creatures, Tanith and Gabriel, who spend 90% of their time hurting people (women) for the shits and giggles.

The instincts of my twenty-something self were correct. Falls the Shadow is not very good. It’s overblown: you could cut fourty thousand words, including two or three characters, and it would still be a poor book, but a marginally better poor book. The pacing is awful, with nothing of note happening for large chunks of the novel—unless you call the torture of women a plot point. Falls the Shadow is wall-to-wall punishing, tormenting and mutilating the female characters.****  

If you can ignore O’Mahony’s misogyny and the plodding narrative*****, there’s something vaguely ambitious about Falls the Shadow.****** The Cathedral and The Grey Man are fascinating concepts. The latter is a member of an ancient, God-like species that imposed their Manichaean will on the first humanoids. The Grey Man introduces uncertainty into the Universe by creating the Cathedral, a metacultural engine. It’s an awesome idea, and to Daniel’s credit, it’s brilliantly realised, tinged with surrealism (including the Mandelbrot Set, Easter Island-like statue heads). All this Cathedral, Grey Man palaver went over my head in my twenties,******  but this time around, it was an imaginative break from all the women-torture at the hands of Gabriel and Tanith.*******

Finally, and this is really getting into the Doctor Who neepery, O’Mahony deliberately keeps the Doctor off stage, partly so he can spend more time kicking the shit out of Ace, but mostly because, at this point, the Doctor is an all-powerful manipulator and O’Mahony wants to take him down several notches, make him feel helpless. The problem is that the Doctor becomes surplus to requirements. You could remove him, and very little would change. This isn’t a good thing given, you know, we’re reading a Doctor Who novel.

This is by far my longest review on Substack, about a thirty-year-old TV tie-in novel that few of you have read. As nostalgia trips go, this has been a weird one.

 *I’m not here to besmirch Daniel’s name. I knew him via Facebook and Doctor Who forums and mailing lists. I liked him, even if I only understood 7% of his gnomic posts. But we no longer see eye-to-eye.

**If you’re interested, My subject thesis was on Maimonides’s views on Human Perfection.

***Yes, it’s a sequel (sort of) to The Time Monster.

****Oh, but aren’t the male characters also tortured? Not really. Justin Cranleigh and his alter ego, Truman, are hollowed-out shells from the moment we meet them. Winterdawn loses his family, yes, but he doesn’t go through anywhere near the physical pain of the women. And Wedderburn, for the five minutes he appears in the novel, experiences a grisly death that, importantly, happens off stage. O’Mahony is nowhere near as kind with his female protagonists.

*****Difficult.

******Can you be vaguely ambitious?

*******I also missed the references to Gormenghast. Although O’Mahony doesn’t limit himself to Mervyn Peake. There’s a bit of Lovecraft, Ballard and Gibson thrown in as well. O’Mahony doesn’t hide this stuff, he wears it on his sleeve, it’s just I wasn’t well-read enough to pick it.

********From the moment Gabriel and Tanith enter the narrative, the already meandering plot stops to a halt as these all-powerful beings, motivated purely by cruelty, hurt everyone in the house. We’re meant to find them frightening. But they’re just dull.