Doctor Who: The Nightmare of Black Island

The Nightmare of Black Island was the tenth novel in the BBC New Series Adventures series. It was written by Mike Tucker and featured the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler. When the Doctor and Rose arrive, they discover a village where the children are plagued by nightmares, and the.
Table of contents

• Doctor Who: The Nightmare Of Black Island
• See a Problem?
• The Nightmare of Black Island
• Doctor Who: The Nightmare of Black Island review

There is Ali, the plucky young local child, who could be a younger Rose clone, and serves as a kind of role reversal, as for once Rose is the leader worrying about her younger, less experienced companion. Bronwyn, the wise but eccentric old woman with a mysterious past whose dire warnings are ignored by the villagers who think she is crazy. Bronwyn unfortunately loses some of her feisty personality later on, as her role is reduced to mutely trailing after the Doctor.

On the villainous side, you have Nathanial Morton, the shadowy retired industrialist who haunts the decayed old Rectory and who might not have lost all his humanity, and the punningly named Miss Peyne, the caricaturish cold-as-ice nurse who turns out to be much, much worse. The Cynrog are not as well fleshed-out as they could be, and the human disguise is too similar to the Slitheen, but their motivating religious mania elevates them from simple destroyers to something more complex and topical. Tucker uses simplistic descriptive language, effectively evoking an eerie, chilling atmosphere.

The Rectory in particular, with its tunnels and grotesque medical oddities, is straight out of a classic gothic horror. The technobabble jars slightly with the overall tone, but it does work. There are a few very minor plotholes the Doctor ordering the villagers to keep the children awake, which they were doing before he arrived and some minor plot quibbles it seems too convenient the Doctor arrived the night before the planned alien awakening, and that the aliens rig up their ships using common or garden cabling.

The only real slip is a bizarrely out of place rant from an alien warrior on the evils of humanity glorifying warfare by allowing children toy guns, etc. Overall this is a very mature novel.

See a Problem?

The dark tone and violence especially the animal slaughter on the island may upset younger children. Even the tagged-on happy ending, humorous as it is, is more suitable for older readers who can identify with the fear of aging and the spoofing of adult preoccupation with trivia. Imagine your worst nightmares come to life. Your email address will not be published. A stage and screen actress - when not attempting to break in to journalism - she can be seen alongside Torchwood star Burn Gorman in the movie The Oxford Murders if you squint a bit and watch really closely.

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• Doctor Who: The Nightmare of Black Island by Mike Tucker.
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You may also like Reviews. Having instructed the villagers to keep the children awake to prevent the appearance of more monsters , the Doctor rushes to rescue her; however, she has already escaped with the help of one of the village girls, Ali.

She tells the Doctor of a strange monster she has seen in the rectory library. The Doctor sends Rose with the sonic screwdriver and Ali to Bronwyn, so she might take them to the lighthouse, in the expectation that the smaller Ali can reach under the alien machinery to alter the settings so it no longer affects the children.

The Doctor takes Rose's place in the rectory. Following Rose's brain-scan, Peyne and Morton know he is a Time Lord , and are excited by what they might gain from him. They show him the monster in the library. The Doctor deduces that the body is empty, created from the nightmares of the children. Peyne admits that the body is to receive the soul of Balor, their warrior general who had crashed on Earth eighty years earlier.

His original body dying, he transferred his soul into the child witnesses of the crash: Morton and the other 'people' attached to the machines. Moving into the final phase, Peyne orders her Cynrog technicians to attach both the Doctor and Morton to waiting machines, and alters them to induce sleep in the wakeful children so she might continue to harness their imaginations.

He investigates the memory of the other victims and, through the vision of the small boy - who has appeared at intervals throughout the story - discovers that Bronwyn also witnessed the crash, and contains some of Balor's soul. The newly created Balor, missing a part of his soul, is mad and ungovernable, wreaking havoc throughout the house.

Peyne frees the Doctor, blaming him. Before 'Morton-Balor' can attack the Doctor, Ali and Rose succeed in changing the settings on the alien transmitter. The village children wake and the adults dream, starving Balor of imagination and shrinking him until the neuroses of the adults become so trivial he ceases to exist. Silence fell on the pub as the patrons spied the strangers, but Beth was hopeful when she heard that one of them was a doctor.

Mervyn was less easily pacified, suspicious of the strangers who had managed to walk through the town unharmed. When questioned by the Doctor, he denied the existence of the monsters and told them to leave when he mentioned the fisherman's death. Luckily, Ali came down the stairs to see what the commotion was, bringing down a drawing of the monster that Rose saw. This was enough to break the tension in the room and let the villagers talk to the Doctor about what had been happening.

It was revealed that the phone lines went dead whenever the monsters appeared, so the villagers couldn't call for help, and they scoffed at the thought that the authorities would believe them anyway. So they had managed to fit their lives around the monsters, coming inside at nightfall where the monsters couldn't get them. Bronwyn Ceredig then interrupted the conversation, accusing Nathaniel Morton of being behind it all as the monsters only started appearing after he had returned to Ynys Du and taken up residency in the rectory.

This accusation was met with anger from the rest of the villagers who called her mad and told her to go away. Apparently she had been feuding with Morton for a while. Eventually, the patrons of the pub returned home, leaving in groups and walking as quickly as they could to avoid being in the open as much as possible. Deciding to visit the rectory and the light house once day had dawned, the Doctor and Rose spent the night in the pub, Rose in a guest room and the Doctor not sleeping as usual.

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