Dead of Winter

"There on the shore, sat in their chairs, were the Dead. Watching me drown."

Writer: James Goss

Format: Novel

Released: April 2011

Series: NSA 43

Featuring: Eleventh Doctor, Amy, Rory

Synopsis 

'The dead are not alone. There is something in the mist and it talks to them."

In a remote clinic in 18th-century Italy, a lonely girl writes to her mother. She tells of pale English aristocrats and mysterious Russian nobles. She tells of intrigues and secrets, strange and faceless figures that rise from the sea. And she tells about the enigmatic Mrs Pond, who arrives with her husband and her physician. 

What she doesn't tell her mother is the truth that everyone knows and no one says - that the only people who come here do so to die.

Verdict 

Dead of Winter was an outstanding novel and ranks as one of my all time favourites. I absolutely loved it from start to finish! I really was thrilled with what I read and whilst reading on an unfamiliar train journey, I simply did not want to put it down. As I embarked from university back across the border and into my nation's capital city for the football, this book really did help pass the time of the quite lengthy journey there and deal with the disappointment of the result on the way home. I must admit I was a little sceptical about reading this book as I knew it was written in a point of view format and I really wasn't a fan of The Blood Cell, also by the same writer, which was written in a similar way. However, where that book was just from one person's viewpoint, this had a wide range of narration which was superb. Well, I say narration but that only really applied to the segments told by Amy and Rory. The journal of Dr Bloom and the letters of Maria and Mr Nevil were tremendous ways of telling the story and I must say that the format was extremely clever. Although each little segment wasn't many pages at all, the novel still managed to escape the feel of being stop and start which was just brilliant. A story having the TARDIS team dealing with amnesia, or more specifically in this case brain spillage, is fantastic and their efforts to try and remember who they were and what they did were fantastic. The revelation that Mr Pond was actually the Doctor and Dr Smith was Rory was incredible and I worked it out only a couple of pages before it was revealed so that was a joy to behold. It immediately changed the landscape of the story which was excellent. Things weren't quite what we thought they were and I really enjoyed that. Once the trio had their memories back though, things really kicked into action and I thought the clinic setting was then fully utilised. The idea of people who were suffering from tuberculosis, or consumption as it was referred to at the time the story was set in 1783, seemed innocent enough but the treatment of Dr Bloom was somewhat questionable. In the depths of winter and in the middle of a storm, he simply instructed the patients to get fresh air and freeze the disease away. That didn't seem logical but things just got all the more intriguing when the mist started talking and the dying started dancing with it. Rory even succumbed to it at one point but that led to a hilarious discussion between the real Amy and the copied version. The Familiars were superb and I loved the concept surrounding them. They were one of the most enigmatic species to appear in a Doctor Who story and that made them simply brilliant. Dr Bloom was using them in a way he couldn't quite understand but Prince Boris took on the role of the enemy for the latter stages of the book in a surprise move but the Doctor had been planning the resolution all along and I loved that. Despite brain spillage, trouble and enjoying a relationship with Maria, he was planning way ahead and that was typically brilliant of him. The characterisation of Matt Smith's incarnation was one of the best I've ever read and I think that contributed to the rating. Overall, a sublime novel!

Rating: 10/10