In a bizarre moment of clarity during I realised why some of these novels are taking several weeks (or even months to finish) whilst others can be licked in a few hours. Font size and line spacing. Most of these books run to roughly two hundred and seventy pages, but the text within is far denser in some cases than others.
It also explains by the epic previous book can be followed by a romp that apparently has the same physical length.
The titular phenomenon this time is a doomsday weapon born from the eclipse of three worlds, Janus Prime, Menda and their sun. Once again, The Doctor is fighting against big cosmic forces and race histories, and y'know just for a change an evil meglomaniac.
The kind of pioneering colonists from Earth that Russell T Davies talks about all the time in interviews have crash landed and built a life on the planet Menda. They were guarded by a group of mercenaries who in an apparent fit of boredom used what appears to be a transmat to go to Janus Prime in an attempt to get back to Earth only to get stuck there, become infected with radiation sickness, inevitably go rogue. Their leader Zemlar has gone mad and is attempting to kill everyone and everything, partly using the indigenous species - a race of spiders.
The Doctor and Sam drop into the middle of this situation and try and sort everything out whilst being captured and separated and all the things you'd expect.
The opening paragraph in which a soldier is chased through a forest by a giant spider-cyborg thing recalls uncomfortably War of the Daleks and I thought it would be another slog, but in the event this is a straightforward but nonetheless engrossing read. Baxendale's prose style is simple and mostly functional; this does however seem to be an adopted approach so that when he turns on his descriptive power the effect is all the more shocking or surprising.
There is an excellent moment when the true horror of Zemlar radiation deterioration is revealed, the flesh dripping off his face. The book is filled with these moments of body horror, with none of the effects of radiation sickness whitewashed. By the end, Sam's skin is coming off in strips and I defy anyone to not skip through the yuckier parts.
Zemlar is an enemy from the old school, a real of a madman - Baxendale obviously had great fun writing his dialogue. At one point, when it looks like all is lost he rants: 'I can't, Doctor. I've already told you - it's too late.
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