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lucascecil · 5 months

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Something I read - Kursaal

I heard so much about Kursaal over the years since I started going into the Expanded Universe. And it was rarely anything good. I think that's why I procrastinated so much to read it, specially after I devored Alien Bodies so fast. I decided to read it for real these last two days and I was pleasantly surprised - I liked it quite a bit.

Ok, let's start from the beginning: that cover is fucking gorgeous. One of the prettiest from the EDAs. I have a tough time with werewolves in Doctor Who because I usually find the stories not that much interesting - but I LOVE werewolves. Blood on Santa's Claw was a good surprise in that prospect last year and now there is Kursaal.

There are two highlights in this book for me, but let's start with the characters.

Our regulars - Forever romantic Eighth Doctor and miss Samantha Jones

The book is stuctured in a way, at least in the first two thirds, so that the narrative is never from the Doctor's perspective. It's Sam's, it's the secondary characters', but never the Doctor's. I liked that quite bit because this is primarly a horror story, and so you had these chunks of the narrative where the Doctor would disappear because he was not with any of the other characters and it raised the stakes so much. It helped with that feeling that something ominous is about to happen and every single character is at danger. I wish Anghelides kept that in the last third.

There are plently of references to his past and dialogue that helps build his character here. "I wish I'd brought my umbrella,' said the Doctor. 'I remember I used to have one.'' Him and Sam have some delightful banter when they arrive at Kursaal.

[...] Oh great, you're making me sound like my mum.' The Doctor had come back down the tunnel towards her. 'Well,' he said solemnly, his face level with hers, 'for that, I apologise most sincerely.'

Or:

'Where is your spirit of adventure?' he demanded brightly. 'In its box alongside your umbrella.'

There is a chase scene midway the book where the Doctor is pilloting a ship and it's very well constructed, but also so much fun because while he's doing it he's also telling a story about how he learned to drive. He woofs and tells werewolf Sam to call him Rex, when she is trying to bite him.

And then you have Sam. I have been strugling with her in past books. Her introduction in Eight Doctors is fun, but bizarre. She is great in Vampire Science and has an interesting dilemma in Genocide, but is non-entity in The Bodysnatchers and outright awful in War of the Daleks. There is an interesting idea planted in Alien Bodies, but it's so much more because of the concept behind it than because it's Sam.

She is great here though. No, really. Most of the book in the first two thirds is told through her perspective and it's interesting seen her deal with such violent deaths and the situation she's in. When she meets the HALF personel, this enveromentalist organization that is bound to make Kursaal fail, of course she is simpathetic. She talks a lot about her dad in the beginning of the book and it's nice how you can tell she misses him and love him. Even through his faults.

Her jealously of the Doctor has been well established in previously entries, and it's present here but much less. And not as irritating. I was spoiled that she would try to make the Doctor her wolf-king at the end of the book and I thought I would hate it, but I didn't. She is not in control of her body, the virus is making some less desirable traits of her bubble into the surface and it's brief.

I do wish though that she hadn't forgotten the plently of people she killed in Kursaal. Anghelides makes a good job of working upon her guilty because of the person she killed back in Genocide. The deaths that happen here, albeit not exactly her fault, could be incorporated into that. Also, I don't like when a character goes through horrible things and do not get to remember it because it only feels exploitative.

There is beautiful scene when the deaths start getting to her head and she is angry at how apathetic everyone on Kursaal is and how it's making her feel..

'They treat death so casually here', she said. 'The animals, the enviroment, even the people.' The Doctor studied his socks. 'Don't judge those two so harshly, Sam. It's just the way they deal with death on a regular basis. [...] 'Don't be so hard,' he persisted softly. Don't think it's brave or clever or necessary to take death in your stride. Because you have something that I wish I had: you have youth, you have so few preconceptions, you have the inexpressible joy of discovering things for the very, very first time. Don't let yourself become hard. I know you want to be grown up, but don't forget to enjoy being the child as well.' [...]

There are two scene where she and the Doctor talk about changing the past and about her timeline and both are great. It's always a topic I like to see being brought up in the companion-Doctor dynamic. The last one, at the tail end of the book is my favorite:

Sam sighed her favourite, world-weary wigh. The Doctor was avoiding the question again. 'So our work here is done?' she said, trying to sound like Batman. 'Is that how you see it, Doctor? The Jax have been wiped out. The drug guys are behind bars. We've done our bit. Made a difference.' She peered closer at him. 'Left our mark.' This made him open his eyes and squint up at her against the sunshine. 'I'm not sure that's true. Sometimes one has just to do... enough.' 'Oh, come on, Doctor. But what's enough? We could make a real difference.' The Doctor proped himself up awkwardly in his deckchair. 'What should we do? Prevent the First World War, perhaps? Save millions of lives? Imagine the effects on history. Smaller scale perhaps. Warn Lord Cardigan ahead of the Charge of the Light Brigade? Save six hundred lives, six hundred ripples through history. Cardigan would never become a hero, and you'd lose a valueable item of knitwear.' 'That's not what I meant...' 'Save just one life, then. Make on short visit to 1948, nudge Nathu-ram Godse's arm just as he fires the fatal shot at Gandhi. One life, with immeasurable effects on humankind. But what effects? But how would they have affected you life, Sam? Would your father have gone into medicine, would your mother have become a social worker, if they hadn't seen things they wanted to change? And if you and I, with the benefit of our hindsight, control their lives for them, is there any element of choice in any of it? And would you even exist? 'I think I'd rather die than survive knowning I allowed an innocent person to die,' Sam bridled. 'My little life would be nothing compared to the many that we might save.' The Doctor grasped her arm gently. 'But the very existence of that little life would have been the means for saving them.' He smiled a warm smile in the afernoon sun. 'Just one of Time's little paradoxes, eh?'

Paul Kadijk and Mister Gray

They are mainly the secondary antagonists of the book, although that's not entirely true for Kadijk at the last third of the narrative. Gray however is the centre of the themes of the book about the enviroment, preservation of flauna and flora and explorativism. It's neatly summarised by Amy at the first few pages of the book:

"You'd earn their respect if you allowed them to do their job. Which is protecting these ancient artefacts from your bulldozers. Doesn't this cavern move you? Listen to your heart, if you can hear it over the sound of jingling coins."

Kadijk is however the most interesting of the two and perhaps the best character besides Eight and Sam. He is strongly characterized, a very unpleasent man. He may be a workaholic because it's through his loyalty (if you can call it that) to his work as head of security of Kursaal that some of his redeeming qualities (however few) are shown.

Yet since his arrival, Kadijk had achieve some sucess in reducing HALF activity on Kursaal. The newsfeeds said he was a lateral thinker. His staff said he was a tyrant who demanded the impossible and achieved it through fear. His wife thought she was better off without him. 'Go and marry bloody Gray, why don't you?' she'd said with cold deliberation on the day she left him. 'You see more of him than you do of me.' That was two years ago.'

There is this bit at the beginning of the book that was very well written about his work as a "cop" and how it changed him. It's an example of what Sam comments later on how the people in Kursaal aren't fased by death anymore. How it disturbs her. And it stuck with me because I couldn't help but think of a Doctor Who audio, Absolution, where Eight's relationship with his companion there is destroyed because he shows no feelings upon the death of their friend.

And it stuck with me also because it's so easy to fall into that trap of not caring for the world around you anymore. It's something I've been struggling with in my personal life for a while, and so when the novel touched upon this topic it resonated with me.

As he spoke, his eyes never left the corpses. He had seen worse when he was a junior officer back on Kandax. At his first murder, the SOC officer Bhairom had brought him over - 'to get your opinion' - pushed him into the tent protecting the scene of crime, and shown him the two kids' bodies without any warning. Junior Oficcer Kadijk just had time to dodge back out again before he had brought up his whole lunch, to the cherry accompaniment of his senior's laughter. It was the first and only time he'd ever thrown up when viewing a body. Bhairom had seen it as a cheap gag on the new boy. She attributed no motives to the two runaways' flight from home, it just gave the murderer opportunity. She just saw two small corpses, the latest in a long line of dozens of dead bodies in her career. Kadijk had forced himself to follow things through, and to her irritation had also followed the kids' bodies through the post-mortem stages and to the funeral. When he'd nailed the father for the deaths, Bhairom had been sidelined and Kadijk promoted. [...] Now, as he looked at this young woman's corpse with its guts spilling into the dirt, he just saw one more corpse, and he could understand Bhairom at last. He thought about bringing Zaterday across for a closer look, but reconsidered when he thought about where his blue junior might throw up.

Weirdly enough it's Kadijk who has the closest to character developtment between the secondary characters. He is very antagonistic to the Doctor in the first two thirds, but then a time skip happens and fifteen years later he has mellowed out a bit. He feels for Cockaigne death's a litte bit and under the surface you can see he wonders if he failed Zaterday because of how he treated him. But he's still a bit of a bully, he still hasn't seen his children in years and I couldn't help but laugh when he and the Doctor talk about Zaterday:

'I wasn't thinking about the security clearance you gave him. I was referring to the way you behaved towards him.' 'Affectionate bullying.'

Kadijk dies a terrible death at the end of the book after - perhaps justified - smashing the Doctor's hand and knocking him out with an axe. Possessed Sam kills him. It's a good death and he goes out on fire. I think it's ironic he died trying to do what he tought was right. And I can't fault him too much, I probably would have exploded the cathedral too.

The body horror and the Jax

It's the second highlight for me. There are so many, many terrifying descriptions about the Jax and the dead corpses that just stuck with me. You can perhaps say that Kursaal has a pace problem and that the plot takes too long to start moving forward, but I disagree. Because of how some things are suggested at the beginning of the book, rather than shown, there is this feeling that something horrible is about to happen at any time.

It starts when the Doctor points out, at first without suspecting anything wrong with it, that the bodies have not started deteriorating. He tells Kadijk someone must have sent the SOS signal much earlier than the deaths, but you know it's not true because we saw the attack in the first chapter and it was Amy who called them. Then later, a body disappears from the morgue. Some more pages, and it's two bodies. And you know the dead are walking again.

And of course, when bad things do happen in page, Anghelides make sure to detail them disturbingly. There is a point, when the Doctor and Cockaigne have gone back to the cathedral, that one of the wolves is decapitated by Bernard. I love the descriptions there. It's so violent, it's so bloody and it's horrifying because Cockaigne just decapitated the body of his already dead friend. Not much later you have this scene, Johnson being another member of HALF that just died:

Johnson was standing up. In the attack, her neck had been hacked though at the front, so when she stumbled towards him he could see her head lolling forward awkwardly. In the sharp brilliance of the police vehicle floods, Cockaigne could see that Johnson's left arm and hand were covered in thick brown hair. The rest of her skin was shimmering, undulating - and then more coarse hair began to srpout from underneath. The police guards stared in disbelief. Johnson took two more steps towards Cockaigne, who shied away. Her green eyes focused uncertainly on him, and she threw her head in a gargling howl. But the effort was too much, and her slashed neck finally gave way - her head dropping off backward, and her body falling prone on the muddy ground. The head bounced twice, and rolled into a pool of dirty water.

One of my favorite bits is when Gray is transforming into the Jax:

Gray stumbled to his feet, tearing off his jacket then ripping his shirt and tie off savagely. Metal buttons pinged and bounced like scattered change on the wooden floor. Then he lunged on to the desk with a howl of anguish. Sam could see, in the moonlight, an arch of hair splitting out down the skin of his spine. The medallion still dangled on its chain around his neck. [...] Grey's obscene transformation continued. She watched his clean white nails suddenly sprout longer, more pointed. He screamed out a howl of anguish as his legs - his rear legs - bent awkwardly in the opposite direction and dropped him to the floor on his haunches. His new claws gouded a short path in the surface of the solid wooden desk. Then he turned his head into the moonlight streaming in through the open window, and Sam could see it distending, stretching, a muzzle forming from the centre of the mass of hair at the centre of his face with a sickening cracking sound. Pointed ears developed from swollen buds on the top os his head, and he screamed in agony and exultation.

The werewolves themselves are not that inventive, sure, but I like it. I love how there two kinds. The Jax themselves, the sentient species, and then you have the dead bodies being infected and being controled in a kind of hive mind. There is also a bit of a twist that the Jax are not the wolves themselves but the sentient virus that infects them. Also! Because of that plus the descriptions of the infection on the dead and how it's spreading through Kursaal and the tourists, this feels a little bit like a zombie apocalypse. Which I liked a lot.

HALF, Kursaal and the themes

HALF is a ecoterrist (or is it?) organization that is sabotaging Kursaal. They are used on the narrative to comment on how the construction of the park is destryoing the planet and killing native life. And of course, how evil corporations are. Which are both true. Amy and Cockaigne are the most important characters from HALF in the book; the others are mostly cannon folder for disturbing deaths. Amy's death took me by surprise, I was not expecting it. And after that? Nobody is safe in the book.

I do wish though it (the HALF) was more cohesive with the themes. Perhaps Sam could have a conflict about what to do with the Jax; perhaps they could've been used to comment onto ecofacism (which they are not, I am just playing with what ifs), perhaps the park could've been indeed destroyed but it fucked up the future. I say that because they are core to the themes of the book and yet it's not important at all in the timeskip. By the Kursaal has finished its construction, Cockaigne is no longer working with HALF and the politics of the park revolve around the drug cartels - which are well established as a small problem fifteen years prior, so the worldbuilding is very done, it just doesn't fit that well thematically.

One of the things I disliked though, is that the book doesn't use the parks to its fullest. Kursaal is a leisure planet, full of thematic parks with vividy imagery. We could have had so much more fun with that.

And then, everybody died. Or, the Veredict.

This a very bleak book. I was not expecting that. Every single character dies horribly, except for Sam, the Doctor and a minor officer. Even some background characters. It fits, in a way. It's a blood hungry narrative and I like it for what it is. I even thought it would be a fitting ending for Sam if she died here. It could have been visceral, with a few tweaks in the thematics beats.

Considering how much dislike I had seen for Kursaal, I was not expecting such a fun read. It's even my third favorite book so far, behind only Vampire Science and Alien Bodies. A good surprise. ★★★★☆, for now.

#Bookshelf #EIghth Doctor #Sam Jones #EDAs #Kursaal #S-till the only person in her class who wouldn't throw rocks at gays-am Jones #Doctor Who

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