Sean Jumps the Shark: 'Scream of the Shalka' for October

Hello loyal listeners! Apologies for the lateness of this episode and this post. Still, if you've not yet listened, our September episode on Marc Platt's Downtime is still available for your listening delectation and amusement.

Marc Platt is not the only writer who novelized his own work for the book ranges, of course. Barry Letts did the same when he adapted The Ghosts of N-Space, and for our October episode, we'll be reading Paul Cornell's adaptation of his own script for Scream of the Shalka, which was recently released on DVD. From the back cover:

When the Doctor lands his TARDIS in the Lancaster town of Lannet, in the present day, he finds that something is terribly wrong. The people are scared. They don't like going out onto the streets at night, they don't like making too much noise, and they certainly don't like strangers asking too many questions.

Scream of the Shalka is something of an oddity, of course, as it was originally intended to be, for lack of a better term, canonical. The Ninth Doctor portrayed in the story was meant to carry on directly from the Eighth as seen in the 1996 TV Movie. However, the new series was announced before Scream of the Shalka went live, meaning that the "Shalka Doctor" was quickly forgotten in favor of the new canonical Ninth Doctor, played by Christopher Eccleston. But more to the point: is the book any good? We won't be watching the story itself beforehand, so, as with Downtime, we'll be judging the book as a book. We hope you'll read along and do the same.

For further reading (SPOILERS ahead, as always), you can check out:
Scream of the Shalka at the TARDIS Library
Friend of the show Robert Smith?'s review at The Cloister Library 
But it for your Kindle!

P.S.--In case you're confused as to why we're reading a Past Doctor Adventure when the rotor should have Sean selecting a Virgin New Adventure, well, it's mainly so we could do Shalka as soon as possible after it came out on DVD. For November, we'll do a NA, and December will see us reading an Eighth Doctor Adventure. However, it might be time to re-examine the rotor and see if it couldn't be tweaked...