This review will be some what chaotic, but it is what it is. I hope you're able to follow it.

First of all this book has a soundtrack:

Hunting High and Low by A-ha.
The song's playing in the background in the graveyard where poor Harry Harvey, a deeply conflicted gentleman, is nearly scared to death (literally) when something rises out a grave to kill a teenager about to threaten an old man's life with a knife. We'll follow him through his madness, interactions with the ghost of his dead wife and his acceptance of who he is finally.

It is questionable whether Harry's story is all that important to the book as a whole, but it is significant that both he, and his lodger, David Daniels, are in the book, along with the shadowy cruisers at Smithfield cemetery[1], and is mentioned in the UNIT logs at the end of the story[2].

It's a Sin by the Petshop Boys.

Wanted Dead or Alive the well chosen ending song by Bon Jovi.

And a poem by William Butler Yeats The Stolen Child

Though the book came out in 1996-97, the action takes place mainly in 1987 with trips back to 1977 and a brief glimpse of 1963.

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What to say ...
I liked this book. Really. It's a real page turner and the characters, whether likeable or not, are well rounded and interesting.

However, this is not a nice book. It's probably one of the goriest books that I have ever read (Doctor Who or not), starting with the immolation of a drug dealer named Capper and ending in the deaths of more that 11,000 people, including those on a commuter train, a number of petty thieves and drug dealers, people who bought and subsequently consumed £ 50 packets of alien tainted coke and most of the residents of at least two apartment blocks.

The Seventh Doctor is really dark in this book, the number of people destroyed in his wake is amazing, his attempts to stop the tragedy unfolding around him too little too late. For all his knowledge, he's unable to help the people in desperate need and the situation falls apart around him. His frustration with the people he's dealing with is palpable, used as he is to having his finger on the actual pulse in any situation, only to be stymied by the petty silence engendered by small lives.

The basis for the story is that of two desperate women, one who wants to be a mother, the other who wants to keep her children safe.

Eva Jericho is, in a word, a nut-job, or psychotic, take your pick. Definitely 'damaged goods' and mental. She's a woman who can not take responsibility for her own actions she blames her school rival for convincing her to shoplift to gain entry into an elite clique whilst at school. The theft is petty at best and she got caught, so it's on her record, but it's such a minor offense it really has little real bearing in her life beyond the size it's taken on in her mind and she's had her life dream of having children torn apart by too many miscarriages. She is probably literature's (most certainly my) first serial shopper - she buys clothes only to mutilate them and return them as damaged goods to the shops. She's so desperate for children, she convinces her husband to purchase a child for her ...

Winnie Tyler is a woman with a problem. Her husband has run off and left her with two children and another on the way, and a pile of debt. Desperate, Winnie makes a bargain, for a certain amount of money, she'll sell her baby, pull her family out of debt and take off for better climes. Except she has a secret and it's going to set in motion a chain of events which will lead to family tragedy ... except it's about to be compounded by the arrival of an alien intruder determined to bring War.
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This book reads like a laundry list for some of RTD's favorite things when in comes to story telling, including, but not limited to:
The name 'Tyler'.
Housing estates, tenements or projects.
Big alien creatures to which a human can become attached: i.e. the Cyber-creature in The Next Doctor.
People caught up in a crisis.
Children caught in the crossfire.
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[1] Two significant gay characters in a Who book!
[2] It's hinted that, thanks to to events in the story, both carry a possible cure to HIV ( )

Many of the Doctor Who novels published in the 1990s were written by authors who either wrote for the original tv series or would go on to write for the revived series. This novel is significant in that it's author Russell T. Davies would go on to be the showrunner who brought Doctor Who back to our tv screens in 2005. In common with the later tv series, this story is set on a council estate with a family named Tyler.

Much like in Andrew Carmel's Warlock, a narcotic drug turns out to be an alien force. In this case, cocaine contains an ancient Gallifreyan weapon called the N-form. The weapon draws power from a pair of twins separated at birth who are connected by a vampiric waveform. The whole plot is rather complicated, but it's setting in the depression and poverty of Thatcher's Britain is a well-formed world for the Doctor, Chris, and Roz to unlock a mystery and a human tragedy. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2310165.html

I think Russell T. Davies is the only Who showrunner to have written a novel set in the Whoniverse before he took over, and this is it: published in 1996, set in 1987, and a really important taproot text for New Who and particularly for Rose, its very first episode. The number of common elements is pretty remarkable:

• The first character we encounter in the story is the daughter of Mrs Tyler, who is a single mother


• She says to the Doctor at one point, "You think you're so funny", a line almost echoed by Rose Tyler a decade later


• The Tylers live on a council estate where strange things are happening


• The strange things include (but are not restricted to) a doppelganger of a black neighbour created by an evil alien intelligence


• The Doctor's female companion is Roz


• At the very end the Doctor goes back in time to meet the young Tyler girl before the adventure started in her time line


• As the alien invasion fully manifests lots of people die horribly and swiftly


• There are several pretty mosntrous middle-aged women characters for whom motherhood is a driving motivation

All of this is not to say that Rose, let alone New Who as a whole, is "just" a rewrite of Damaged Goods; there's a lot of bloke-on-bloke sex and cocaine in this novel, which I think even RTD might have been prevented from bringing to the small screen by the BBC higher-ups, and it's also tied rather more directly into the mythos of Gallifrey than any New Who until (and possibly including) The End of Time.

Having said all that, I thought this was a cracking good book of the New Adventures series, taking the Doctor Who framework and fitting it to an unexpected setting, a gritty council estate. It's a complex plot with lots of elements, and Davies keeps all the balls in the air, juggling furiously. Even his monstrous maternal characters are a bit more sympathetic than they somehow ever came across on screen. I'm surprised that this isn't better known among fans; a lot of the elements that brought the show back are here, and also we can see some ways in which it might have gone differently. I would strongly recommend it to anyone interested in how New Who came to be the way it was in 2005. ( )