Prose Set during the BBC Books Earth arc, once series editor Steve Cole writing under his Tara Samms pen name, Mordieu places the Doctor in the middle of Hollywood during the TV boom of the late 1950s as a TV writer who worked on the likes of the "Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse" and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It's told from the point of view of a fellow writer who finds himself in the midst of some local mayhem related to a strange epidemic of stigmata.
There's some useful religious debate in here about why the affliction mimics the paintings rather than the actuality of what Christ may or may not have experienced (with a section which lists the various biblical contradiction with verse references). The descriptions of the affliction are also suitably gory. Published in 2003 but presumably commissioned earlier, the weirdness of the wilderness years had fully matured.
Written in noirish tones, we're given an insight into where this particular amnesiac Eighth is psychologically through his own first person inserts. We discover that he's using writing jobs as a way of expressing the various memory fragments which are surfacing, the plots of Inferno and the TV Movie are proposed but dismissed. We're reminded that he's not really himself in this period, disinclined to become involved.
Placement: Between the novels Endgame and The Stranger. Yes, really.
No comments:
Post a Comment