Rags

by Mick Lewis

A Third Doctor, Jo and Unit novel. In Dartmoor, a punk band get into a fight with a group of rich and rowdy young students, whose Range Rover crashes into their car. The groups are spurred on to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0563538260
• ISBN13: 9780563538264
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Doctor Who Books
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 4.4" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

Violent, yet classy!!!

A band of punk rockers and their filthy cattle truck has started a convoy across the South west of England gathering loyal followers in their wake of destruction and murder everywhere they play. With Jo having succumbed to the malevolent pull of hatred from the band and the Doctor lost in some limbo void, it looks like its up to UNIT to solve the problem the way the Brigadier likes to, with all guns ablazing.You'll find that RAGs is a very different style of Doctor Who, written with a huge amount of horror elements along with very visual violent scenes. This horror element fits in perfectly with the time it is set in, the English countryside atmosphere helping make the tone perfect and feels like it is a JAMES HERBERT novel.You'll also notice that the Doctor, although he does play a big part in the finale, isn't really around much throughout the novel. He is either procrastinating about whether to do something proactive about this convoy or he is lost in some mind controlled void. Although the author does recognise this in the book, it does seem the Doctor was only a background character. Although the mind trip does involve some of the Doctor's subconscious doubts about himself, which are always good. This book could have easily been written without being placed in the Doctor Who universe at all.Characterisation is excellent for the Doctor, Jo and all the regulars of UNIT with Mike Yates shining through again as he tends to with novelisations he is in (as opposed to the sorry git he is portrayed on TV.)Overall, this is a good British horror book that just happens to involve the Doctor. RECOMMENDED!!

Rags - A Great Novel!

Inventive, imaginative and nightmarish! This is a great book for the Doctor Who fan who has a bit of imagination and likes it when Doctor Who goes off the track into unfamiliar territory. Mick Lewis is a visual writer, and his images are both haunting and disturbing which really draw the reader into his world of moor-ish terror.

Bone Thugs-N-Disharmony

"Rags" is certainly not for everyone's taste. It's moody and gruesome and contains almost intimidating amounts of British extreme culture as sampled in the mid-1970s. Certainly many references to punk band I'm quite sure I've never heard of. Nominally a story featuring the Third Doctor (long seen as a figure of the Establishment), the bubbly Jo Grant, and UNIT, this book views our heroes through a glass very darkly indeed.Rampant references to punk culture, Stonehenge, and Doctor Who's private angst -- how's that for a combination? Well, 1994's "No Future" got there first, but "Rags" is far more extreme and gritty, and sans the happy, fluffy ending.Still, if you can stomach the constant stream of blood and cynicism -- first-time DW author Lewis doesn't seem to be taking anybody's side, and the only character with a happy ending has to leave our "dimension" to achieve it -- you'll find this to be a harrowing, intelligent read in the style of some of Stephen King's darker hours. Surely if Richard Bachman were British this is the kind of book you might reasonably expect to see him write.Obviously "Rags" cannot be recommended to everyone, but it's written in a bold style and tells us that this is a story the author *really* wanted to tell. Since we so rarely see such storytelling passion in our DW novels these days, "Rags" certainly brightened my month. In a dark way.

Anarchy in the Whoniverse

The punk ethos enters the Doctor Who universe for the first time since Paul Cornell's _No Future_, where its main function was to sweep the reader up with easy slogans and an unironic sense that conformity to the anti-standard is more noble than conformity to the standard. _Rags_ is the antithesis of that type of easy analysis and comes across as one of the strongest Doctor Who books ever because of it.This is an ugly book. There are many extremely uncomfortable moments in the narrative, stemming from both depictions of violence to some wholly unsettling imagery. The magnitude of the threat and the way it seems to effortless sideline the Doctor, Jo, and the Brigadier will give you chills. There are passages where you will have to stop reading and close your eyes against the creeping horror that lurks throughout the book. The heart of the story is raw, brutal anarchy wrapped in every evil foible of the human psyche, and when the final resolution comes you will feel relief but you may not be reassured.Some will argue that the Doctor doesn't have an active enough role in this novel. Personally, I think the Doctor's role was exactly right. I don't think any Doctor whould have a center-stage role in a story like this, but more importantly the final resolution is completely incumbent upon the Doctor's presence. I shudder to think what would have happened had the Doctor not been there at the end.If you like horror novels, you have absolutely no excuse for not reading this book. It's fantastic.