When I read City of the Dead, there were several points where I sat back and thought, “Wow, this is a novel.” I have to admit that, as penetrating insights go, this looks to be right up there with “Hey! I think water might be a liquid!” But typical EDAs read like Novels Lite—rectangular and papery like regular novels, but without all that fattening wit, verve, and imagination. Lloyd Rose’s book is operating on a different level. It has characters, not genial stereotypes; a setting, and not a generic backdrop. You can tell that some thought went into it beyond “which television cliches do I want to revive today?” Like I said, a novel. City of the Dead feels, for lack of a better term, alive, something that, out of the previous Richards era EDAs, only The Turing Test and The Year of Intelligent Tigers achieve. (Father Time and The Slow Empire were good, but I just don’t think they’re quite on the same level.) I don’t think COTD is quite as good as either of those books—I have a few reservations which I’ll explain later. But it’s damn good.
The first thing you notice about City of the Dead is the sense of place. You can tell Rose did her research; New Orleans comes alive, and the entire book is colored by its setting. Dr. Who is a series with tremendous scope, where the characters could be on an alien planet one day and in ancient Greece the next. The mix of cultures and environments that the characters see must be the most amazing thing about their travels. But so many of the books take their settings for granted, and never get into the details that make their place and time unique. (This is especially a problem with books set on alien worlds, which are usually just contemporary England with the serial numbers filed off.) It’s always refreshing to get a book that feels like it takes place in a real city, instead of a cardboard backdrop.
Characterization is Rose’s other strong point. The Doctor is very good; this is one of the few EDAs where he never comes off as an idiot. I think it’s because this is the first time in ages that we’ve had an extended look inside his head. We get to see the Doctor think about the situation. Usually, he just wanders around blithering and doing lame magic tricks, like the tipsy old uncle everyone tries to avoid at the family reunion.
We get to see a lot of thinking in this book. The TARDIS crew spends a lot of time doing research — looking up records, tracking down rumors, and following clues. This is so much more interesting than the usual capture-and-escape shenanigans. I’d like to see the characters spend more time in libraries and laboratories than they spend running through corridors.
The supporting cast is good, too; each of the eccentrics and grotesques the Doctor meets on his journey through the world of New Orleans’s occult wanna-bes feel more real than all the characters in Dark Progeny combined. Even the most incidental characters are fleshed out.
They’re also very funny. City of the Dead is the funniest book we’ve had in ages, even more so than Earthworld, which was a deliberate comedy. Which might have been part of the problem — Jacqueline Rayner tried too hard to be wacky. Her exaggerated characters and situations were built around the jokes rather than around any kind of realistic core. They couldn’t help but fall flat when other aspects of the book pulled in the opposite direction. In COTD, the humor arises from the characters. Dupre’s ridiculous ghost tours and Roy’s pretentious ramblings have a basis in real human behavior, and are all the funnier because of it.
COTD isn’t a laugh fest, though. Most of the book is disturbing, or touching. Sometimes, as in Teddy Acree’s first scene, it’s funny and pathetic at the same time. I cared about all of the characters in a way that the EDAs don’t often achieve. The things that happened to them had an impact.
A lot of other recent Who books have inserted literal “magic” into a fictional universe that formerly insisted that everything, no matter how fantastic, had a rational explanation (or at least one that a fictional time travelling alien would recognize as rational). City of the Dead is another, but it handles the subject more deftly than usual. It’s natural for a book that centers around a subculture of occult wannabes to use their vocabulary. But Rose also gives just enough indication that someone more familiar with the technical underpinnings of this universe — maybe even the Doctor himself before his amnesia — might have more useful and accurate terms for what’s going on.
But City of the Dead also has one big problem, and the magic is at the heart of it. Over the course of the book, it becomes gaudier and more spectacular, to the point that I almost expected the villain to have a level, alignment, and character class. By the time I got to the animated furniture and the asassination by long-distance heart excision, my suspension of disbelief had snapped its bungee cord and splattered all over the concrete.
What the last few chapters reminded me of was the ’90s remake of “The Haunting.” Its supernatural revenge plot and CGI ghosts would have worked in an Indiana Jones film, but didn’t belong in the world of Shirley Jackson. COTD’s most spectacular magical effects felt just as out of place in the EDAs. More importantly, they were out of place even in this particular book. In the last few chapters, the magical pyrotechnics take over the narrative, at the expense of the quiet character-based moments that are Lloyd Rose’s real strength. When I think about City of the Dead, I don’t recall the ending. What I remember is the aftermath of Dupre’s ceremony—the Doctor comparing New Orleans to Budapest in one of the best speeches in the EDAs; returning Dupre’s acolyte from the ceremony to a drunken parent and the home shopping channel, and realizing that “probably it wasn’t going to be all right.” This is the heart of the novel, and it’s a shame that the ending shoves this kind of thing aside.
The other problem with the magic is the sonic screwdriver effect. In the TV show, the sonic screwdriver could do anything. I mean, anything. In addition to driving screws, it set off mines and marsh gas, opened locks, could be converted into an electromagnet, and made a pretty good espresso. The magic in COTD is also a plot device that can do anything—summon elementals, animate furniture, travel in time, whatever. It gets old quickly.
I think, though, that these are first novel problems—City of the Dead tries to be too spectacular at a point where it needs to pull back a little and maintain the tone of the earlier chapters. Overall, it’s one of the best books we’ve had in ages. It’s one of the few EDAs that I can honestly call a good book, not just good for a media tie-in. It’s up to the same standards I expect from non-tie-in novels.