The novel “The Crawling Terror” by Mike Tucker was published for the first time in 2014.
The life of what used to be a quiet British village is turned upside down when some of its inhabitants come face to face with giant insects. Poor Alan Travers has it even worse on his way home because he ends up in a giant spider web and the spider that built it is nearby.
The Tardis has detected an anomalous signal resulting in the 12th Doctor and Clara Oswald arriving in what seems to be a normal British village. Very soon, the situation turns out to be very different with the discovery of a corpse trapped in a spider web of truly extraordinary size and strength. The Doctor must quickly investigate to understand what’s happening, and old tales dating back to World War II may offer a clue.
“The Crawling Terror” is part of a series of novels connected to the new “Doctor Who” series. They’re targeted to a wide audience by being linear enough to be appreciated even by very young readers but sophisticated enough to interest more mature readers. With the adventures of the Eleventh Doctor, there was a small change in the size of the novels about “Doctor Who” new series adventures, which have become slightly larger.
“The Crawling Terror” begins like one of those old science fiction movies in which there was a threat in the form of giant insects and arachnids. At the time, these were usually mutants generated by exposure to radiation in connection with nuclear tests. A novel connected to the “Doctor Who” saga written today offers different developments.
Especially in the initial part of the novel, Mike Tucker shows fragments of the very ordinary life of some villagers and the consequences of the mysterious appearance of giant insects. Their life’s disruption is progressive since it turns out to be immediately lethal only for an unlucky villager who comes across a spider. The author seems to have learned from the lessons of great authors of the past such as John Wyndham in creating the contrast between normal life and the subsequent crisis to increase the tension.
The arrival of the Doctor takes the story to the next level, beyond the classic story with giant insects. The developments are also built on a good characterization of various local inhabitants, which include people of very different ages from children to the elderly. Their interactions with the Doctor and Clara are important to the plot and add strength to the story.
An element that may be curious for the plot is the involvement of the military from a base near the village. It’s explicitly stated that UNIT was called in but is busy abroad, so cannot intervene. The officers of the local base don’t know the Doctor and this makes their relationship more complicated, also due to Twelfth Doctor’s character and his complicated relationship with soldiers.
The plot offers various twists connected to what’s behind the threat, also in the discovery of who the real antagonists are. For a novel of limited length, the plot is complex with secrets to discover that partly date back to the era of World War II. There’s a sense of danger for the Doctor and Clara too with horror tones that appear in different ways thanks to story developments.
Overall, “The Crawling Terror” is a novel that in my opinion, exploits well certain classic elements of science fiction and horror to build a story that goes far beyond them. Mike Tucker builds a plot very suitable for the “Doctor Who” saga with well-reproduced protagonists and good extra characters. For these reasons, I recommend reading it. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
