Doctor Who Magazine #632

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out today, and features another Who Connections piece by me, this time on Star Trek (pp. 44-49), examining how and when it first influenced Doctor Who and when, exactly, Doctor Who then influenced Star Trek. For this, I spoke to Star Trek books writers Diane Duane and Barbara Hambly, and to Jean-Marc Lofficier.

If this is of interest, you might like to read my posts on the anthologies Star Trek by James Blish, Star Trek 2 by Blish, the original novel Spock Must Die! by Blish, and also The Disappearing Future edited by George Hay.

The new issue of DWM also includes a glowing review by Jamie Lenman of Space Security Service - Bret Vyon Lives, the audio set on which I am producer and co-writer, which is released by Big Finish next week.

I took pictures of the Star Trek and early Doctor Who novelisations to illustrate my article, and here are some of them for those that like that sort of thing.

Talk on David McKee, Mr Benn and Elmer

You can now watch my talk, "The David McKee Sketchbook - The Origins of Mr Benn and Elmer", on YouTube:

The talk was given on Friday evening for the friends of the St Barbe Museum + Art Gallery in Lymington, which is home to the exhibition "Elmer and Mr Benn: the magic of David McKee" until 6 September. It's a lovely exhibition, full of amazing original artwork - so bright and colourful in real life, and full of detail and interest. I would like to stand at the back and watch the expressions on people's faces as they enter.

I helped write some of the panels for the exhibition, as well as a piece for the Sunday Telegraph, "Where the strange, secret world of Mr Benn came from".

NB in the Q&A at the end of the talk, I mention Ralph Steadman when I of course mean Gerald Scarfe! But another example of how people working on these different things kept an eye on each other's work: Cliver Juster (film editor and producer on Mr Benn and the King Rollo Films output) told me that Oliver Postgate was a big fan of Towser.

Doctor Who Legends - Patrick Troughton

The new Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition is out now, devoted to Patrick Troughton and 60 years of the Second Doctor.

I've contributed the first article, "The Doctor's Doctor" (pp. 6-11), looking at why so many of the other actors who've played Doctors Who cite Troughton as their favourite, and what that reveals about what he brought to the role. 

Many thanks to Charles Norton, who helped me check the veracity of one of the interviews with producer Innes Lloyd.

Hookland Fragments vol 1, by David Southwell

In the Before Times, pre-Covid, when I lived in London, I would pop along to bookish events — launches, talks and readings — that caught my fancy. Often, I’d bump into David Southwell, who seemed to share similar tastes in odd, unsettling writing that didn’t quite fit any genre. We would prop up the bar and natter at length about the weird things we’d been reading, the arcane bits of telly I’d been digging into, the latest gossip from our time writing stuff for Doctor Who Magazine.

Since those days, I’ve followed with great interest David’s extraordinary conjuring, the fictional county / borough / municipal authority — I’m not really sure what — that is somehow a blend of MR James and Devil’s End from Doctor Who, the woods from X the Unknown, the village from Went the Day Well and a whole hotchpotch of everything else. Hookland is an at once recognisable, vividly real place and frustratingly intangible, a manifestation of social media, constructed from hints and citations. It is brilliantly beguiling.

Now, at last, comes a first Hookland book, largely comprised of ‘Remembering Differently: the Fortean and Folklore Origins of Hookland’, a talk David gave to the London Fortean Society on 28 April this year. In addition, he tells us about the inspiration behind some of his ‘contributors’ (Emily C Banting, C Josiffe and CL Nolan), recounts his real-life meeting with JG Ballard, details how Hookland is not influenced by anything so obvious as public information films, and provides an A-Z of various influences and interests. The latter includes, on p. 51, a reference to me that makes me wonder what on earth I must have said, in a rare moment of coherence.

Just as Hookland is familiar and strange, I’m knitted from many of the same elements that made David and his realm — he’s a little older than me, so TV stuff he watched on broadcast I saw later on video — and yet I also had a markedly different, less precarious childhood. It strikes me that we are from two very different worlds, but Hookland is a name for the fog between time zones, the imaginative space in which we are able to meet as fellow travellers. In fact, quite a lot of my lasting friendships were forged in different iterations of that same rich, creative fog.

As always, time spent with David has got me feverishly thinking, and making connections in what I am writing now that I had not seen before. More to follow...

Bat Eater, by Kylie Lee Baker

“Something grabs the back of her shirt and Cora can’t scream, all her words extinguished in her chest. This is when she dies. The weak link, the boring character in a horror movie who nobody liked anyway, the one with no defining traits, a name no one can remember.” (p. 160)

This deliciously horrible thriller won the Shirley Jackson Award over the weekend. It was first published last year as Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, but the Hodder & Stoughton paperback I read is just Bat Eater — on the cover, on the title page and in the indicia, but not in the closing Author’s Note. How ironic to erase the main character’s name from the title of her own story, given what it’s about.

Cora Zeng is an anxious young Chinese American woman living in New York in 2020, during the Covid pandemic. She works as a cleaner of crime scenes with two other Chinese American misfits, Yifei and Harvey, and she’s grieving the death of her half-sister Delilah, who Cora witnessed being pushed in front of a train by a white man who used the term “bat eater”.

That murder is described in shocking, gory detail and the novel doesn’t hold back on what Cora’s job involves. It is a literally visceral novel, all wet and tender. Cora is haunted by the death of her half-sister, and then haunted by a hungry ghost. She and her co-workers then realise there’s a pattern to the crime scenes they’re cleaning, which seems to be linked to the ghost. To make sense of this, Cora must explore aspects of her own identity and cultural history. There is more than one way to deal with jiāngshī, not all of them successful.

This is a brilliant, compelling novel, especially good on character so that — despite the quote above — we really feel the loss of people. It was interesting to read this so soon after The Lost Voices of Pompeii by Jess Venner, which attempts to return voices to the voiceless victims of a tragedy. There’s something similar going on here, too.

At one point, Bat Eater also reminded me of the most haunting bit in the film Halloween (1978), when Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) runs to a neighbour’s house for help, and though we can see the neighbour through the window, he doesn’t answer the door. For all the film is about a violent serial killer, it’s that small moment of ordinary indifference that has always stayed with me. It’s the same here: for all the supernatural stuff going on, what makes this so powerful, so disturbing, is the horror or ordinary people.

Mr Benn in the Telegraph

I've written a piece on Mr Benn and the work of my hero David McKee (1935-2022) for the Telegraph: "Where the strange, secret world of Mr Benn came from". For this, I spoke to McKee's son Brett, film editor Clive Juster, and am also grateful to the team at Andersen Press.

ETA: It's also in the print edition under the title "Remembering the man who gave us Elmer and Mr Benn", pp. 14-15, Sunday supplement to Sunday Telegraph 12 July 2026. 

The piece ties in to the new exhibition, "Elmer and Mr Benn: the magic of David McKee", running at St Barbe Museum + Art Gallery in Lymington until 6 September. I helped write the panels for the exhibition, and this Friday will be giving a talk at Lymington Baptist Church about McKee and his work:

The David McKee Sketchbook: The Origins of Mr Benn and Elmer

7.30 pm, Friday 17 July 2026

Lymington Baptist Church, New Street SO41 9BH

Tickets £5, or free to friends of St Barbe Museum + Art Gallery

Arturo’s Island, by Elsa Morante

Having whizzed through The Lost Voices of Pompeii while on holiday in Naples, I found — horror of horrors — that I had nothing to read, so nosed through the Feltrinelli bookshop in Stazione Centrale looking for something in English. This classic novel, set on an island in the Bay of Naples, seemed the right sort of thing…

Arturo Gerace is 14, and has lived his whole life in a ramshackle old house — a castle — on a little island, where the only other distinguishing feature is a prison. The previous owners of the house banned women from it, and Arturo has grown up with little female contact beyond a dog who died giving birth to a litter that didn’t survive either.

So when Arturo’s wandering father returns home with a new wife, Nunziatella, who is only two years older than Arturo, she makes quite an impression. Arturo is variously angry, jealous, contemptuous and lusty. Meanwhile, his father disappears for months on end — and turns out to have some kind of relationship with one of the inmates of the prison. Arturo’s mother also died in childbirth, and his feelings for this perfect woman he never knew informs a lot of his outlook and unconscious desires.

First published as L’isola di Arturo in 1957 and translated for this edition by Ann Goldstein in 2019, there’s a lot going on here that isn’t quite spelled out — because Arturo, narrating, hasn’t quite figured it all out for himself. At first it seems quite simple but there are depths and undercurrents: Arturo misreads people’s words and actions, assuming for example that Nunziatella does not reciprocate his feelings because she tells him “no”.

In some ways, Arturo and Nunziatella are just as much inmates as the men in the prison, and then there’s wandering Wilhelm, the paterfamilias, who escapes whenever he can. The Freudian psychology running through a lot of the novel is very of its time (see, for example, my piece for the Lancet Psychiatry on the Freudian influence on Frank Herbert, author of Dune.)

It feels relatively timeless until the last part of the novel when Arturo, turning 16, learns there is going to be a world war. When the prisoner is released, turns up at the house and helps himself to food left our for Arturo, there’s an uncomfortable confrontation — when Wilhelm gives his verdict of his son, and Arturo storms out, meaning to sign up to the army. The book ends with him leaving the island for the first time without looking back, off to an uncertain fate.

As I read the novel, I wasn’t sure there was much to it — it seemed to keep promising something about to happen, and then never quite deliver. But in retrospect I’ve been picking over what characters said and did and must have been thinking, making sense of the real story going on under the surface. Then haunting thought is that Arturo, going to war, did not live to do the same.

I would like to read more of and about Elsa Morante; Penguin Classics published a new edition of her debut novel Lies and Sorcery in April and is reissuing History in November.