The novel “The Laughing Gnome – Scary Monsters” by Simon A. Forward was published for the first time in 2018.
1981. In London, Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart is in a pub during an attack and he too is wounded. However, a few hours later, no traces of damage are found in the pub and the testimonies regarding the possible perpetrators are very different with Lethbridge-Stewart being the only one to have seen a mysterious woman with red hair. His state of mind is made more complex by a strange connection with the 2011 Lethbridge-Stewart.
In Moscow, Major Grigoriy Bugayev leads an assault group to free the passengers of a hijacked airplane. Over the next few hours, what he and his men remember and the physical evidence tell very different stories about the events. Bugayev also has to handle the oversight of KGB agents.
The Lethbridge-Stewart series tells the adventures of the character who became famous in the “Doctor Who” TV show when he works without the Doctor. The stories start from the period immediately following the debut of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart in the TV show and then extend the period covered. These stories include some characters that appeared in the TV show, some invented for other productions connected to it, and others that were created specifically for these novels.
The works in this series tell the adventures of Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart in particular during the years leading up to the formation of UNIT. In this case, the year 1981 is a kind of focal point for a story full of ramifications in the past and in the future. The main plot develops in 1981 but there are several parts set in other years.
Over time, the works of the Lethbridge-Stewart series started forming a bigger picture that completes both the personal and professional story of the protagonist. However, each novel mostly told a self-contained story that could include parts that fit into the bigger story. Instead, in this case, a series called “The Laughing Gnome” was created which develops through various books with more intertwined stories.
The result is a complex plot that in this first book is centered around terrorist attacks in which what witnesses see doesn’t match the objective evidence gathered after the events. The parts set in the years before 1981 help to gradually understand who is behind those events and one of the stories has Anne Travers as its protagonist. Another subplot sees a new appearance of Grigoriy Bugayev, already seen in the novel “Blood of Atlantis.”
A further mystery concerns the involvement of Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart in 2011 and the role of a garden gnome. That’s the final period in the life of one of the great protagonists of the “Doctor Who” saga. Viewers of the classic series and readers of this series of books have got to know him as an action man, so seeing him at a time when he has become frail is sad.
The project of creating a story-arc in which the protagonists act over various decades makes “The Laughing Gnome – Scary Monsters” a novel that pushes a lot certain narrative paths already used in the past in a simpler way. It’s a complex novel that has a very open ending in which some mysteries are revealed but not others that will presumably be developed in the next books. An overall judgment can only be given to the entire story-arc I recommend reading to fans who want to engage in the reading of various interconnected works with a number of plots and subplots.
