Customer Reviews

The Pit (Doctor Who: The New Adventures)

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"Outside, the poet turned to the Doctor and raged at him. Why had they gone into that building, asked a stupid question and then left? It didn't make sense." -- THE PIT, page 149.

What in the name of God was that? Having read for years about how The Pit is supposedly the worst Doctor Who book ever written, I must admit that I approached it with a slight degree of trepidation. Still, I wondered to myself whether this book could really be as bad as all that. Surely there's no book on Earth that could possibly be as hideous as The Pit's shocking reputation would have one believe, right?

Reading the first page was an enlightening experience. The prose revealed here is among the worst that I have ever encountered. The sentences are jerky and disjointed. A sense of proper flow, which is so important to engaging reader interest, is virtually nonexistent. Every character's point of view and every character's speech patterns were all virtually identical with the form of the narrative. This didn't seem like a book populated by people, but rather a story inhabited by a mob of faceless plot devices, having no motivation of their own other than to do haphazard things to develop the story. The quote at the beginning of this review is unfortunately typical. People wander around for no good reason, say stupid things and then move on to the next plot point. It doesn't make sense, and no motivation is ever explained or revealed. Actually having a character point out the silliness of their motivations is no excuse for having characters with silly or no motivations.

Neil Penswick's choice of prose style did a fantastic job at holding me away from the plot. Working out the storyline required quite a lot of effort on my part simply because of the numbing nature of the writing. Yet there were portions of the plot that showed a flickering of potential but, for the most part, they sadly went underdeveloped. A few set-pieces here and there show a glimmer of what could have been an interesting tale. One can imagine a really superior wordsmith doing some marvelous work developing some of the ideas present. Unfortunately, the potentially good ideas fail to shine in the way that they should have.

The tone of the book is actually fairly consistent throughout its entirety. This is a dark and disturbing tale with no happy endings, no humour and no enlightening emotions. It succeeds at being a book without hope and without promise. Had the book made me care about any of its characters, it probably would have been quite powerful. Since I could barely distinguish one person from another, I could hardly care if any of them lived or died. A huge waste considering that the depressing nature of the story is one of the only things here that is handled surprisingly well.

After completing the book, I realized that I hadn't hated it as much as other people have, nor did I abhor it as much as I thought I would from reading the first few chapters. Make no mistake, I'm not recommending this as anything remotely resembling a good book, but it does have moments where one can see a few gems peeking through the mud. A pity though that the gems are mostly glass and the mud is far too thick and smelly to encourage one to wade through it. Every want-to-be author should definitely check out this book if they want to know how not to write quality prose.

(Note: this review was originally written January 7, 2003.)