A Flavour of the Book: “Only the upper body was protruding from the muddy swell of the lake, but that alone was as long as a playing field. Men were milling around it, dwarfed by its mass. The creature’s corpse lay on its side, two huge clawed paws clasped together in some sick parody of prayer. Its neck was as long and thick as a battleship, leading to a set of hideous jaws, each twice as long as a train carriage and crammed with ivory spikes. But above the jaws was little more than a tangled mess of blackened bone. Most of the head seemed to have been ripped clear away…”
The Authortrek View: This is a good solid effort from the very dependable Stephen Cole. David Tennant’s exuberant Doctor is splendidly brought to life in Sting of the Zygons, and Martha is also portrayed very well – Stephen Cole subtly conveys what it may have been like for a black woman to live in Edwardian England, with racism never far from the surface. It helps that the novel features the Zygons, one of the best monsters from the classic series, and the fact that they are adept at shape shifting means that there is plenty of intrigue, as the Doctor and Martha don’t know who to trust. Stephen Cole builds on what we’ve previously learnt about the Zygons, and comes up with some ingenious, but natural twists, with regards to Zygon behaviour, which is quite odd at times in this adventure. Stephen Cole does such a good job that it begs the question of why such ingenious creatures have yet to make an appearance in the new series? Having written that, Stephen Cole’s plot is perhaps too similar in some respects to the new series episode Tooth and Claw, and the setting of the Lake District is perhaps a tad too close to the Loch Ness of Terror of the Zygons… However, the notion that something powerful enough to kill a Skarasen may be hunting down the Zygons is a real novelty that is quite intriguing. Sting of the Zygons is noticeably far more mature than Jacqueline Rayner’s The Last Dodo, without being too frightening for younger readers, so Stephen Cole gets the tone just right. The novel does dip slightly after the excellent first half, and could have benefited from being slightly shorter, but overall, there are more than enough thrills in Sting of the Zygons to please most readers.
To find out more about the author, please visit our Stephen Cole page.
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