Frayed is one of those books that's unpleasant enough I'm glad I got through it in just two short sittings; if I hadn't cleared the first 80% during session number one, I probably wouldn't have come back. The premise is decent enough; it's set in a world where eugenics has reached the point that infants can be screened for criminal proclivity, sequestered away, and "re-trained." With their school under attack from ferocious creatures, these children (and many of their teachers) have been placed in cryogenic-style "dreaming" compartments, left to sleep until the situation has normalized. One telepathic child is unknowingly altering the dream-space, though, and creating a link between that reality and the one outside.

This is heady stuff, to be sure. Unfortunately, Stephen Cole (writing under a pseudonym) never lets it breathe; he's too interested in a relentless action-horror narrative, something a bit like a John Carpenter movie on paper. When the book isn't violent, it's gruesome, and when it's gruesome, it's very very gruesome indeed. In the dream-space, characters' lips fall off in bloody fashion, maggots fall out of their orifices, and there is gore everywhere. Everywhere. Certain Doctor Who books have been criticized in the past for an adolescent use of violent imagery, but I don't think that's what's happening here; this is a stylistic choice, and it definitely keeps the reader on edge. I just don't find it especially pleasant to read.

Frayed's other issue is, frankly, the use of the Doctor and Susan. A lot of reviews have commented on the somewhat fanservice-y way in which they both receive their names in this novella, cementing it as "the earliest Doctor Who story," and bringing it into at least partial conflict with other pre-"Unearthly Child" stories that have been told now in prose, audio, and comic strip form. Personally, I don't much care about the continuity aspect; my personal mantra is that only televised Doctor Who is really worth treating as "the law," and even that's so convoluted it helps if you look at it with a very broad and liberal view indeed. What bothers me more is this proliferation of prequel stories. I never really needed to know precisely why the Doctor and Susan left Gallifrey; how they stole a TARDIS; where their names came from. It's more fun to think about those things and let them remain unanswered. Kim Newman's Time and Relative, which began the Telos range, gets around the issue neatly by telling us a story that happens just before "An Unearthly Child," and while Newman can't resist one or two little hints, he pretty much refrains from telling us the big secrets. That's great - it allows the focus to be on Susan and her grandfather's relationship, how they are becoming more involved with Earth culture, and what gets us to the specific boiling point we see in the first televised episode. Frayed just seems to play the prequel card for the sake of doing it, and worse, the Doctor and Susan aren't even that integral to the story. Mostly, they're there so other characters can babble exposition at them - hardly the most dynamic use of the characters.

Reading the Telos novellas has been interesting. They never fail to take chances, which is good, but that means that some of them are very, very good and some are just appalling. This one isn't badly written, but I found it completely unenjoyable, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but a fairly dyed-in-the-wool horror fan. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1359975.html

It is a little odd - the old man and the girl who travels with them only decide at the end of the story that they will adopt the identities of 'the Doctor' and 'Susan', and the story combines the fairly standard base-under-siege-by-telepathic-horror story with a rather subtly done reflection on establishing and keeping identity. Worth looking out for. ( )

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