Horror of Fang Rock

Target novelisation Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock

Author	Terrance Dicks
Published	1978
ISBN	0 426 20009 8
First Edition Cover	Jeff Cummins

Back cover blurb: On a remote rocky island a few miles off the Channel coast stands the Fang Rock lighthouse. There have always been tales of the beast of Fang Rock, but when the Tardis lands here with Leela and the Doctor, the force they must deal with is more sinister and deadly than the mythical beast of the past. It is the early 1900s, electricity is just coming into common usage, and the formless, gelatinous mass from the future must use the lighthouse generators to recharge its system. Nothing can stop this Rutan scout in its search and its experimentation on humans...

• Horror of the Print by Tim Roll-Pickering
• Judge Me By My Size, Do You? by Jason A. Miller

Horror of the Print by Tim Roll-Pickering 29/3/04

A quick glance at any page of this book reveals that is has some of the largest print I have ever seen in any Target novelisation with about thirty lines a page, compared to thirty-eight in the next published book, Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen. What makes this all the more shocking is that the book is an adaptation of one of Terrance Dicks' own stories and normally these are amongst Dicks' most densely written books. For both Dicks and the novelisation range as a whole, Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock stands out as a worrying landmark suggesting a decline in standards and suggesting that the books can only go downhill from here. In 1994 the proposed reprint of the novelisation was the first casualty of Target's decision to terminate its reprint programme and whilst the loss of the subsequent planned reprints may have denied many fans the chance to get a reprint of Doctor Who - Fury from the Deep, I can't help but feel that it was a blessing that they stopped in March 1994 rather than go one month further and so have made the last printing of a Target novelisation based on a television story this book, showing attempts to maximise the output by cutting down on standards.

Although it is extremely short there is nevertheless a lot to recommend about this novelisation. As the original author of the story it is clear that Dicks retains a strong liking for it and seeks to make it work as well as it did on television. Every single one of the characters is sketched out well, with the class divisions of Edwardian Britain really emphasised in scenes such as the one where Vince realises he has to burn the massive bribe Palmerdale has just given him as he knows he will otherwise be accused of killing the peer. Each character sums up their backgrounds clearly and the story makes for an interesting exposition of how society was structured at this time, with the Doctor and Leela standing out for their different relationship and attitudes. The one element that initially comes across as poorly conceived is the business between Skinsale and Palmerdale about the confidential information that will allow the latter to make a fortune from on the stock market but at the former's expense. Initially this comes across very much as padding but gradually it comes to the forefront of the story as both men through their own personal greed and honour disrupt the Doctor's attempts to deal with the menace and save everyone. The images of Palmerdale being found and killed as he hides on the balcony of the lighthouse so as to keep his bribing of Vince secret and of Skinsale being blasted by the Rutan as he scrabbles for diamonds are both strong ones, showing how in the end they bring about their own destruction.

The resolution of the story is a little hard to swallow though. The idea that the Doctor can use a diamond and the lighthouse lamp to rig up a laser to destroy the Rutan ship is extremely difficult to swallow. It is well known that this story was an emergency replacement for Dicks' The Vampire Mutations, and some believe this story was taken off the shelf from when it had been earlier rejected. Had the story had a more normal gesticulation process I suspect the ending would have been far more rational - indeed it would have been interesting to see how the tale might have fared had Christopher H. Bidmead been the script editor. Other than this denouement, Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock is a well told book, but the huge print and blatent attempt to make the text run to 128 pages count severely against it. 4/10

Judge Me By My Size, Do You? by Jason A. Miller 22/9/25 Judge Me By My Size, Do You? by Jason A. Miller 22/9/25

"For both Dicks and the novelisation range as a whole, Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock stands out as a worrying landmark suggesting a decline in standards and suggesting thatthe books can only go downhill from here." - Tim Roll-Pickering, 2004

Nah.

Horror of Fang Rock as a typeset volume has larger print and thus probably fewer words than any other Target novelization, argues Mr. Roll-Pickering.

So what?

Word for word, the Fang Rock book is Terrace Dicks at his most atmospheric, evocative and empathetic. There may not be a whole lot of book here by word count, but every single word, sentence, paragraph and scene is a delight. Working from his own scripts, telling a story that he came to only reluctantly, Terrance proves that even a quickly written, micro-sized book, adapting a last-minute replacement script, can be a more enjoyable read than some of the 275-page full-sized novels that he wrote for Virgin Publishing and BBC Books in the 1990s and 2000s.

The production history of Fang Rock as a TV serial is instructive. Terrance was commissioned to write a vampire story, and a vampire story he submitted --- but the BBC ordered it to be shelved, as they had a more prestigious vampire serial in production at the same time and didn't want the competition. So script editor Robert Holmes, with Dicks under contract and with a story slot to fill, had Dicks set a story on a lighthouse, a story Holmes wanted to see told but which Dicks resented having to write...

... so he just set Dracula on a lighthouse. It's called Fang Rock, one of the characters is named Harker, and the characters are stalked one by one. And the BBC never noticed that their "non-Dracula" story had the word Fang in its title and a character named Harker. How player is that?

As for the text of the book itself, this is no mere transcript of the rehearsal scripts. It's March 1978, and its Dicks' eleventh novelization in fifteen months. I am not making that up. Almost a dozen books in just over a year --- and he had a full-time day job going on at the same time. That's a breakneck pace, and my dude just crushes it with this one.

There is nothing better, really, than Terrance Dicks prose. Short, to the point, but good vocabulary and good use of adjectives and adverbs. No such thing as a Terrance Dicks run-on sentence, and, as short as his books are, he never talks down to the reader; he uses collegiate vocabulary, even while avoiding words of more than three syllables. And he can set a scene. The spooky Prologue, setting Fang Rock's backstory, begins: "Fang Rock had an evil reputation from its earliest days". The first chapter opens with: "It began with a light in the sky." Terrance started a lot of his novelizations with the word "It", and he always tells you right where you are.

Fang Rock as a TV story is populated largely by one-dimensional characters, with the exception of Colonel Skinsale, who has two dimensions. But Terrance is always able to characterize these people perfectly; Fang Rock was well-acted on TV, but you don't need to rely on the performances of, say, Colin Douglas or Ralph Watson or Sean Caffrey, to get the picture. Ben, the senior lighthouse keeper (and the first to die), looks "sardonically" at a shipmate. He and Reuben (the crusty old seaman) were "continuing their never-ending argument", and Reuben "always bellowed so loud he hardly needed the [speaking] tube". Lord Palmerdale has "a spoiled, else-indulgent look about him", and you can imagine that description came directly from the rehearsal script and gave Sean Caffrey the perfect note to play Palmerdale.

Louise Jameson was wonderful, wasn't she? She was given a fairly thankless role, cast primarily to show off her legs on TV but always found interesting ways to portray Leela's aggressive nature and intellectual curiosity. And the words Dicks writes for her must have made it easy for Jameson to find those hooks. Here, she observes the Doctor "mentally rolling up his sleeves" to solve a mystery, and her chant about "Harker, keep the boiler pressure up" is exactly as scripted.

The Target books in general tended to avoid giving much POV to the Doctor, preferring to show the world through the eyes of his companions or those guest characters who entered his orbit, but when Terrance does slip us into the Doctor's head, it's a delight. The Doctor is able to figure out that something strange is going on between Palmerdale and the Colonel (a conflict that ends up complicating the plot and dooming all the guest characters); more happily, he realizes that Reuben "had only the vaguest idea how to work [the telegraph], but was too obstinate to admit it". Isn't that wonderful? The word "obstinate", in a 100-page children's book? You could double the length of the book and be hard pressed to find better vocabulary choices. Oh, and the foghorn sounds like "the cry of a love-sick sea monster". Don't you just have the most intense crush on a writer whose mind can produce phrases like that?

Because Terrance is novelizing the rehearsal scripts rather than the finished video, there are some differences in the book. And woe betide any director who crosses Terrance Dicks -- just listen to the audio commentary on the Fang Rock DVD to hear Terrance take credit for what looks good while blaming the production team for what doesn't. Here, the actual rescue of the shipwreck survivors is shown (I imagine that was unfilmable on the budget allocated to Paddy Russell at Pebble Mill), and the Part Two cliffhanger doesn't end on a reaction shot of Adelaide, of all people. And you can also see where the actors improve on what Terrance gives them:

"Gentlemen, I've got news for you. This lighthouse is under attack. And, by morning, we might all be dead. Anyone interested?" --- The Doctor in Part Two

Even though it's a short book, Terrance works a character insight or observational humor or even foreshadowing into almost every paragraph. This is no mere script-to-page transfer, which is a frequent and totally unfair criticism often leveled at Dicks. In the book, Terrance uses the aura of chill emanated by the Rutan to foreshadow disaster. We get internal emotion from Vince, the last lighthouse keeper to die (and, arguably, the most tragic character in the piece). Terrance also helps us understand why the Colonel risks (and earns) death by scrabbling for diamonds on the floor. "There was a fortune there," the book tells us, "enough to keep him in comfort for the rest of his life. He couldn't leave them." And the Doctor's "dead with honor" lie/eulogy is given more room to breathe ("It was no way for a man to be remembered").

And, for a 100-page book, I dare you to write a better ending than Terrance's:

"There was a wheezing groaning noise, and the TARDIS vanished. The only sound was the thundering of the waves as they crashed on the jagged coast-line of Fang Rock... no-one was left alive to hear them."

Chills. Perfection. Thank you, Terrance Dicks.