Doctor Who: Rags

Past Doctor Adventures #40

by Mick Lewis

'Join the Unwashed... Join the Unforgiving. Join the Ragged, for we are the way.'

A convoy of disenchanted ragamuffins is winding its way through the south-west of England. At its head, a filthy cattletruck containing four punk mummers… and something else. The band plays sudden, violent and hate-filled gigs along the way: Dartmoor, Glastonbury Tor, an old cemetery in Bristol. And every time they play, people die in unspeakable ways. Aristocrats, high-flying stockbrokers, police officers, all find themselves the victims of a Class War that is threatening to shatter society.

Within the dark cattletruck, a malevolent force is leading this ragged army on a Magical Mayhem Tour towards its final, secret destination. With Jo powerless to resist its seductive influence and the Doctor lost in a nightmarish void, can the band from hell be prevented from staging its final society-cracking performance, and thus spelling the end of the road for… everything?

Genres: Doctor Who, Science Fiction, Fiction, Doctors, Ebooks

251 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published April 5, 2001

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe the memory cheats slightly when it comes to Rags, but out of the many PDAs that I could lay my hands on - this one seemed to stick out.

So I’m surprised that it’s ranked amongst the worst Who books ever written, though I like Lewis other novel for the range too...
Doctor Who: Combat Rock

It’s certainly very violent as a benevolent force infiltrates the disillusioned youth through a series of performances by a hate filled punk group.
The south of England setting including Dartmouth, Glastonbury and Bristol seem fitting for this era.

It might be my love of horror being the reason why I’ve enjoyed Lewis two novels, they certainly something different in the Who-cannon!

[Jenni]

I have finished many terrible Doctor Who books in my time, but the sheer unpleasantness of this one has defeated me.

(It was at least reasonably well written, on the whole? But the subject matter was so horrible, plus all the women were described boobs first, plus the one Chinese character was constantly referred to as "the Chinese girl" rather than by her actual name, and I just couldn't go on.)

[David Layton · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Rags" is something like "Doctor Who" had Clive Barker written it. The basic story is that an ancient evil thing that causes people to go on murder rampages for the heck of it has been reawakened because of a nearby car crash between a group of punk rockers and a group of upper-class twits. Feeling the negative vibe between the two classes it decides to torque up the hatred between the two groups with predictable bloody results. Delighted, it then decides to create an apocalyptic class war through a punk-rock hippie caravan in southwest England. The thing resurrects cadavers to use as puppets for its mesmeric tricks, but gets most of its success through exuding a psychic influence that stretches for miles.

Like Mick Lewis's other book I read, "Combat Rock," this novel is deeply unpleasant. Lewis as a writer seems to enjoy his own descriptions of murder just a bit too much for my taste. Lewis's 1978 England is land of nothing but hatred, disaffection, and bitterness. Almost all of his non-DW characters are overly fond of the word "shit." As with most horror novels, explanations of the horrible thing are thin and unconvincing. [Spoiler Alert]. The ending of the novel has the Doctor mostly lecturing the horrible thing just long enough to allow the person you most expect because he is the person you are supposed to expect least to effect a heroic self-sacrifice and re-entomb the horrible thing. [End Spoiler Alert. You may return to your regular activities]. Lewis's characters are mostly realistic in their particular distasteful ways, as is the dialogue. He writes a good sentence and describes action very well. I suppose one's satisfaction with this novel will rest on how much one likes gory horror stories. I do not like such stories in general, so could not work myself into liking this novel all that much.

[Gareth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one is infamous for its violent scenes, and rightly so as there are a lot of them, with a possessed rock band inciting murders everywhere they go. There’s an undercurrent of repressed class warfare that contrasts interestingly against the most establishment-friendly Doctor of them all. The violence, if not necessarily enjoyable, is at least called for within the plot. (I think it’s still worth asking why BBC Books published stuff like this knowing that the audience included kids — but that’s a problem not at all exclusive to Rags.)

Where Rags really stumbles is in not backing up the violence with substance. The characters are generally well drawn, including the regulars, but they’re cut from the same fairly unpleasant cloth. The plot adds a bit of mythology as it goes along, but there isn’t really much to dig into beyond the “ancient evil that feeds on violence” concept that is more or less apparent straight away.

The best thing about it is Lewis’s unique turns of phrase; whether or not he’s going for unpleasantness, he makes Rags rather offbeat and interesting to read. I wish it was stronger overall.

2.5

[Ria · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the south west of England a group of musicians are travelling and playing music, but not just any music, angry, violent music with the power to exert mind control on its listeners.
No matter who you are you can fall under its spell and commit unspeakable acts, even murder.
The Doctor is locked in a race against time to stop the band playing its final deadly gig...
Loved this, it's right up my street with the musical connection and sinister overtones.
A quirky, inventive Doctor Who tale with actually more than a hint of gore and horror than is usual.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can understand that this is not going to be for everyone...it's as far from a standard 3rd Doctor era story as you can imagine. In fact, it reads far more like an early New Adventure novel -- you could substitute the 3rd Doctor & Jo for the 7th Doctor and Ace. This is violent, gross, brutal, nihilistic, and angry...far more than most Doctor Who stories. Yet I find it incredibly compelling and powerful, and deals with punk and anarchy in a way no other 70s era story ever did. Brave, bold, and astonishing...but understandable if it's not your cup of tea.

[Jacob Licklider · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rags is a terrible novel. It is 251 pages of Mick Lewis attempting to analyze Doctor Who, punk rock, the Jon Pertwee era, and the 1970s as a whole and completely misunderstanding how much of any of those things worked or became popular in the first place while coating the entire book in some of the most egregious violence and gore to feature in a Doctor Who novel. After reading Rags, I have come to the conclusion that fans who claim the BBC Books are less edgy than the books by Virgin Publishing have not read any of the New Adventures or Missing Adventures or have read Rags. This is not the first time that the content of a Past Doctor Adventures novel has included more violence, racism, and sexual assault than any of the books by Virgin Publishing. This is also a book that while there are small ideas here that work: a villain that’s a representation of death is a good idea, but as with everything about this book it has been done elsewhere better. Do you want a deconstruction of the UNIT family? Blood Heat has you covered. Do you want an exploration of punk in Doctor Who? No Future does that and has it in spades. What about a story set in an isolated British village with some folk horror undertones? The Daemons. Are you looking for a deconstruction of the Third Doctor and his relation to authority? Watch any Jon Pertwee led Doctor Who serial.

Rags is also a book where the prose itself is nearly unreadable. It’s incredibly basic and Lewis thinks using various slurs and cursing basically every other page. There is a character who is referred to not by name in the narration but overwhelmingly as “the Chinese Girl”. The rest of the characters don’t have character, they’re just violent and angry at the world while Lewis seems to think that’s what defines punk. The Doctor is barely in the middle portion of the novel as the violence ramps with every page. I mentioned The Daemons in the previous paragraph and that is the closest thing to what Rags is in terms of plot and even structure, but without the Master or really any character. The Doctor is cruel, Jo is a complete ass to everyone around her, people vomit maggots and take glee in doing so. This book deserves only as much effort in reviewing it as Mick Lewis had in writing it. 1/10.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This tale sits as a sort of brutal, more graphic companion piece to The Daemons - picking up on similar themes of "pagan" ritual, sacred sites, folklore, rural magic, and sinister ancient forces. The tale is full of gruesome violence, making it unsuitable for very young readers, but makes very evocative use of language to draw the reader in to the atmosphere of simmering violence and madness generated by the touring band from hell. Speaking of language, my only mild criticism is that the author needed to find adjectives for walking other than mincing - if he said it once he said it a dozen times!
Jo Grant forms the central character, with the Doctor almost peripheral to events as they unfold (his role in the resolution of the story did seem a little odd, without trying to give any spoilers away). The villain of the piece was excellent and, whilst the TV show could not include the explicit violence and incontinence of the book, would make a really interesting monster for the Doctor to tackle on screen - tied u as it is with the political and social commentary of the tale.
The author has a great feel for the period and builds tension and menace very effectively. I'll keep an eye open for his other Who novel.

[Kris · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mick Lewis managed to produce the only Doctor Who novel I have failed to finish, the incredibly offensive Combat Rock. This one I managed to finish but it manages to be even worse. The reason being that whilst Combat Rock tried and failed to be a violent satire on colonialism. This is just rehashing better stories.
70s Folk Horror - The Daemons
Exploration of Punk meeting UNIT (including a showdown at Stonehenge) - No Future
Attempts to be "adult" including random appearances of a female companion naked - most of the Virgin line.
On top of this none of the regulars feel right and everyone is meant to be acting out of character. People are just brutalised but as the end gets no follow-up we will never see any results. Also add on to that regular pieces of racism and misogyny in narration and it is really poor.

Maybe if you want a middling splatterpunk novel then this will be to your tastes, but as a Doctor who Novel for me it does not work at all.

[Daniel Edwards · Rating 2 out of 5]

I find it surprising sometimes just how accurately the authors of the PDA novels are able to portray a particular era of the original show that their novel happens to be set within.

The general consensus here seems to be that the book is set somewhere at the middle point of the Pertwee era (which is season 9 of the classic series). Unfortunately, this happens to be the era where the primary avenue of storytelling for the Pertwee era, the Doctor's earth exile, and the UNIT family, was starting to seriously flag. So much so that there were only two standard UNIT stories during this season and you can see this flagging through the quality of those stories - the former 'Day of the Daleks' is the season debut and a bold start and the latter 'The Time Monster' is the season finale and probably the worst story of the Earth exile period - and the show runners were desperately trying to find ways of getting the Doctor away from Earth simply for the sake of variation because they were running out of ways to rip off another Quatermass idea six weeks in a row.

In this case, the novel 'Rags' falls somewhere in the middle point between those stories, and it feels as dull as dishwater. It has none of the appeal of the other Third Doctor PDA or VMA stories, it tells us nothing new about the Third Doctor, it makes him as patronising and insufferable towards Jo Grant as he is in 'The Time Monster' and seems to have no inkling of where it's set vis-a-vis his relationship to the Brigadier. It doesn't even manage to fill in the blanks of any of the primary characters' backstories, which is what some of the aforementioned VMAs did best.

The details surrounding the alien menace itself seem to be intentionally vague as if again this were a story from that particular series when the writers were running out of ways to both find a new threat beyond alien invasion and mad scientist and to make it interesting enough to sustain a story of protracted length.

Then you've got the problem that a lot of the story's narrative is told to us through secondary characters that we simply just don't care about. They do not stand out, either in the mind or on the written page, except in how awful they are. He writes about people as if they were philosophical problems and not people, as though class was something that all people think about on a daily basis, when in truth the only people obsessed with class divisions are communists and aristocrats because only they have a vested interest in either maintaining or upsetting the status quo.

And of course, even though the book is set in the mid-70s at the burgeoning of punk rock and its more liberal offshoots (e.g., Rock Against Racism), the author, Mick Lewis, doesn't go anywhere near the topic and how that might be exploited within the complicated breakdown of class and race as social constructs. So again he weirdly also manages to fit the story rightly to within its own era as the only time during this period when you wre likely to see ethnic minority actors in Doctor Who wasn't in contemporary or historic stories but in stories set in the far future, where characters were written to be so one dimensional that you could paint them with any canvas you chose.

In short 'Rags' drags, which is painful when you consider that it is about fifty pages shorter than most standard length Who novels, much like many of the PDAs of this period when the books were just being churned out for the sake of it. It's a waste of an Earth exile story, a waste of the UNIT characters and set-up, and a waste of a Doctor Who novel.

[Hidekisohma · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like my 3rd doctor books are steadily getting worse and worse.

Last of the Gaderene - Pretty damn good book.
Verdigris - not bad. a little weird, but okay
Amorality Tale - depressing and not good, but at least it was an easy read
Rags- just bad all around.

At this rate i'm going to assume the next book will just catch fire when i pick it up.

This book was bad for ALL the reasons.

First of all, if you're looking for a book where the doctor is in most of it and solves the dilemma of the book, this is not one of those. The doc meanders around looking for a signal before getting trapped in the back of a truck and trips balls for 80 pages.

If you're looking for a book where Jo does something useful, this is not one of those as she becomes indoctrinated and becomes useless for the entire book.

If you're looking for a book where the words on the page make any sort of sense, this is not one of those books.

If you're looking for a doctor who book that isn't disgustingly gory, this is not one of those books.

I honestly can't recommend this book for any reason whatsoever. At the VERY least i could say that Amorality tale read really well. I didn't like the story, but at LEAST David Bishop wasn't pretentiously up his own butt. This book however, i cannot say the same.

The short version is, this book wasn't FUN. There are 3 things a doctor who book should be.

1. Fun. just..fun.
2. Have the doctor feature for most of the book
3. don't be pretentiously convoluted with your writing style.

This book failed on all 3 counts. Which is sad, because i read the premise and i thought it actually looked pretty good. But the author decided to make this book a commentary on society and we all know how those go.

The book also wanted to follow several side characters including a drunk and a reporter. And for some reason, this author REALLY liked talking about how gross homeless drunks were. like..in detail. I didn't need that mental image. thanks. This is doctor who. Not a non-fiction book about the plight of alcoholism in the UK. The alcoholic and the reporter together DEFINITELY have more screentime than the doctor as he's kind of a side character in his own book.

I put this book at the same level that i put "Longest Day". It's not good by any means, but it's not into 'hate' territory like "Eleventh Tiger" or "Vanderdeken's Children". I just...really wanted to be done with this one.

Even 2 out of 5 and i'm immediately selling this book. Not going in the collection.

2 out of 5.

[Hector Keating · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mediocre who for 150 pages then an absolute shitshow for the last 100

The monsters needing faith to survive is tacked on the end as how could they get out of the stone in the first place the only character who knew of them had known for 20+ years and believed it was fiction.
What is the knife for at the beginning it isn’t talked about once after the stabbing. I had believed that the knife was what had to be destroyed for the first half of the book in a sort of mediocre 70s version of lord of the rings but once it was clear it wasn’t a Chekhov’s gun I quickly lost faith in the novel. Frankly, I’m surprised the book didn’t crumble into dust as the villains did due to essentially Lewis running out of pages he could fill with mild horror and boring chunks of unit dialogue.

I’m not easily spooked but maggots are an exception for me but Lewis manages to write a description that bores me. I’m no fan of horror but at least Lewis should write something scary to fit into the genre.

The side characters are particularly boring and are basically the same I dare anyone to explain who nick, rod and jimmy are without mixing anything up. Sun isn’t particularly interesting but on the rare occasion she works well with Jo.

Also why isn’t the doctor in a doctor who novel I’m alright with novels such as downtime as it doesn’t brand itself as a novel with the doctor in but one that is within the universe of who. The doctor simply doesn’t feature except for visiting Dartmoor to abandon Jo, going to Wiltshire to try and jumpstart the plot again just for it to fall down a ditch and to have a conversation that kills the antagonists.

I would not recommend this book to anyone unless they are wanting to read all of the past doctor adventures in which I would wish them luck with getting to the end

[Harry · Rating 2 out of 5]

I heard a lot about this novel and I also heard how dark it was. It certainly was dark, not to mention graphic! I bought and read this book mainly out of curiosity. As far as Doctor Who books go, this was by no means the greatest. There isn’t really much of a structure to Rags and The Doctor is barely in the book. It focuses mainly on three supporting characters, Sin, Kane and Cassandra as they are the only characters that I actually liked.

The Ragmans motives hardly make any sense as all he wants to is make everyone on earth equal for some reason. There are some good scenes when the doctor confronts the Ragman. Rags does suffer from a lot of padding, and I mean A LOT. This meant it took me a while to finish despite the book only being 250 pages long which makes it one of the shorter PDA’s. the regular characters such as The Brigadier, Benton and Yates are written fairly well. Benton is criminally underused. Yates gets some nice development towards the end but for some reason, The Brigadier has a strong hatred of hippies and orders UNIT to massacre a group of travellers which is so unlike The Brigadier.

Overall Rags is a pretty poor book and didn’t really feel like a doctor who story. It has loads and loads of swear words on pretty much every single page. Definitely avoid this book if you’re sensitive as there is a lot of dark and disturbing moments within the novel. Personally I would give this a 3/10

[James Lotshaw III · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is by far the worst PDA that I have woefully come across, as I make my way through the Doctor’s (from 1st to the 8th).

The book felt like it was written by a teenager, with a a serious focus on big boobs and violence.

I’m glad that he didn’t write a third Doctor Who book.

[Nadia · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the strangest Dr Who books I've read, but very very enjoyable.

If you don't like splatterpunk, gore, nightmarish imagery and a very, very cynical view of the third Doctor (for the record he's my fave) don't touch this.

Personally that's right up my alley. If you're going to do a novel in a well established series why not go a bit out of left field. The story still feels like a Who book and it skillfully avoid being as godawful as the similar attempt 'Star Wars: Death Troopers'.

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aaaah Rags....This is actually my first re-read of this little selection. I first read this as a teenager and it was something of a revolution to me (pardon the pun). Just the sheer amount of dark elements that was in a Doctor Who story was amazing. You've got blood, you've got gore, all that lovely adult-themed stuff and at the time that was brand new for me.

Rags still remains one of my favourite Doctor Who books. Even as a second read through, most of the good bits are still as poingniant as ever and I found so many bits that I missed before. This story also proves a point I've been making for a while - well two actually:

First- it proves that Doctor-less stories can work tremendously well if worked right (seriously, the Doctor in this story is either in his lab, catching up in Bessie or in the back of the truck)

And secondly - Doctor Who does well when it has darker storylines and would do well with something more horror themed.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 2 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2125391.html[return][return]This is a Third Doctor novel with some fairly gritty horror elements. It wasn't at all to my taste; the same author has also done a pretty violent Second Doctor novel, Combat Rock, where I felt it was just about justifiable given the colonial situation on which it was based. Here however I felt there was no such excuse; it's a story of a rock band taken over by an alien entity and spreading Evil around 1970s Britain (where, in a dystopian alternate universe, they have started showing Blankety Blank several years before it affected our time line), attempts at pastiche flopping miserably in several places and simply gratuitous. One of the rather few Who books I really wouldn't recommend to anyone.

[Angela · Rating 1 out of 5]

A band starts to act strangely and its followers begin to kill people. The Doctor and Jo follow a an alien signal to where the band play. Jo gets caught up with band followers. This is a very dark and brutal book, with lots of killings in quite descriptive ways. I didn't like this, and believe me, that is incredibly rare for me when in comes to Dr Who books. I'm not a fan of horror books, maybe that was my main problem. It was just way too dark and brutal for me.

[Joni · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wanted to like it a lot more because I felt it had potential, but it didn't particularly deliver. I didn't feel drawn to any of the incidental characters, and even the Doctor and Jo were pushing it by the end. Not terrible, though.

[Kirsten Migliore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ending was pretty abrupt. Very disappointing.