Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is probably one of the most influential British children’s novels ever written. It’s a story that has had homage after homage in popular culture, and pretty much everybody has heard of the character, Willy Wonka. Though I never read the book as a child, I do enjoy Roald Dahl’s work, and it was one of those books that I felt I should try.

At the start, I loved it. Chocolate is delicious, and so much of the first half of the book is dedicated to how great chocolate is, and it talks about all kinds of delicious Willy Wonka inventions. Reading it, it’s easy to see that Roald Dahl must have loved chocolate himself. There’s a description of simply eating a chocolate bar at one point, and gosh, it makes me want to eat a chocolate bar. There’s also a chocolate river.

The second half, I enjoyed less so. It’s darkly funny throughout, but it has a preaching moralising aspect to it. The book’s protagonist, Charlie, goes on a tour of the chocolate factory along with a bunch of other kids. These other kids, while perhaps a little rude, all meet with a horrible fate as seemingly some kind of karmic retribution for their flaws… except their flaws are things like, they enjoy watching TV, or, they like to chew gum. Fortunately, none of them die, but gosh, it sure does feel a lot like Roald Dahl is just up on his soap box moaning about certain behaviours that frustrate him. It hasn’t really aged well at all and I just felt sad for the kids a lot of the time – even anxious for them.

The most uncomfortable thing is the Oompa Loompas. They survive in our popular culture and are thought of as these whimsical fantasy creatures… Unfortunately, their portrayal in the novel reads very much like colonialist exploitation, or even slavery. Indeed, I understand that Roald Dahl made changes to the book, because the first edition was even more problematic (even for it’s time), but even in this version, it’s hard for a progressive-minded adult not to feel weird about this.

There is a lot that I admire about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – the descriptions of food are great, and the factory itself is a wonderful and enchanting setting that really captures that childhood feeling of the world potentially containing endless possibilities. Plus it’s genuinely funny, even for adults and literary fans will enjoy seeing the origins of things like the golden ticket. The problem is that Roald Dahl pushes his belief too much, and those beliefs are pretty dodgy, so it does spoil the book quite a bit.

Rating: 6/10

Buy it here.

The premise of this book is a bizarre, metatextual one: what if Star Trek: The Next Generation had had an eighth season, and that eighth season had been so incredibly bad that it had never been aired, and then someone had had the chance to watch these unreleased episodes and write an episode guide about them? It’s not your standard sci-fi franchise spin-off book, but it’s a lot of fun.

Originally the author, Mike McMahan, had a Twitter account which he dedicated to writing really silly Star Trek TNG story synopsise. Due to its popularity, he was able to publish an official book filled with these storylines, which he said was inspired by his love of the silly B storylines that real episodes of TNG have. It’s a nice, loving way of sending the series up, and it’s sure to appeal to fans.

So what kind of things do the characters get up to in this season? Well, Q sets up a timeloop where Barclay relives the same day over and over, to see if it’s possible for him to survive without the help of others, but he ends up comically dying every single time, sometimes in the most mundane ways (e.g. an ear infection spreads to his heart). In another, there’s a planet that ends up being entirely populated with Riker clones. In another, Q asks for Picard’s help in breaking up with Cleopatra, but then accidentally changes all of history, so then needs to mess the timeline up so badly that it all snaps back to normal.

Some of them, in particular the one about Q messing up the timeline, are things I’d have loved to have seen as actual light-hearted episodes of the show. Other times though, it goes too far down the path of being silly. Most notably, Data and Geordi are both always written as socially awkward losers who are extremely childlike – they’re complete parodies, and I know that’s a weird criticism since the whole thing is a general parody of TNG, but I think it’s funnier when the characters are close enough to their legitimate portrayal, but still in the absolute silliest storylines.

Still, as a fan of TNG and Star Trek in general, overall I found this book hilarious. There are so many laugh out loud moments that fans are going to love. It’s a weird combination of storylines that are so silly, they’d obviously never have existed, and those that could be just about plausible. Still, to its credit, even though I didn’t love all the episode ideas equally, not one of them failed to make me laugh. Also, one of the stories introduces a member of the Q continuum who goes by the name California Steve. I want that to be canon.

Rating: 8/10

This is the second book in the Howl series of novels. While it is set in the same universe as the first book, for a long time, it feels very much like an entirely unrelated story to Howl’s Moving Castle. You are introduced to a character called Abdullah who lives in Zanzib, a completely different country, and while Ingary is mentioned, you won’t find any familiar elements for quite a while.

The main character, Abdullah, is a simple carpet merchant who dreams of a better life, liking to imagine that he might actually be a prince, and not related to the family that he struggles to get on with. Of course, adventure soon comes his way, when he is sold a magic carpet… the only problem is that he can’t figure out the magic word to activate it, but somehow says it in his sleep.

He whooshes off to a beautiful garden, where he meets a woman called Flower-in-the-Night, and the two seem to got on really well – and she’s a princess too. Everything is going well, until a djinn swoops down and kidnaps her, which of course leads the sultan to believe that Abdullah himself has something to do with the disappearance. To prove his innocence, he heads out to find and rescue her.

Along the way, Abdullah is joined by an old soldier, who’s a wary character, uninterested in helping others – the two make a very different team to Howl and Sophie from the first book. Aside from that change in dynamic, the biggest difference is the fact that the story is much more focused this time. Abdullah is on a journey to rescue Flower-in-the-Night, while Sophie Hatter just kind of hobbled along with Howl, encountering one whimsical thing after the next.

In true Arabian Nights fashion, the story also features a Genie, who comes under the control of Abdullah. He also adopts a cat called Midnight. I can’t say a lot about either of them without spoiling anything, but the way that they were used was absolutely fantastic. Indeed, I might say that they contributed to my favourite part of the book.

While the book may seem standalone at first, towards the end in particular, you will get a lot more out of it if you read Howl’s Moving Castle first. Those who are put off by the huge differences should keep going, as you won’t be disappointed. While I personally prefer the charming whimsy of the first book, it’s clear that Diana Wynne Jones was going for a different style and feel for this one, and I can’t fault her for expanding her universe in that way. If you wanted the first book to be just a little more serious, then you might like this one even more. If you’re an Aladdin fan, then I think you’ll definitely love it, but regardless of your taste, I think it’s fair to say that this is a great fantasy adventure that should appeal to most fans of the genre.

Rating: 8.8/10

Buy it here.

This was a behemoth of a book that took me the better part of a year to read (as an aside, I am very glad I have multiple books on the go these days, rather than just one, like when I read Ulysses) and during that time, I had very mixed feelings. Sometimes I’d read a chapter and think “Wow, this did a really good job of capturing the bonds of friendship, what a good book”, other times I’d read a chapter and think “gosh, this is boring, why is this description of a river so long?” and sometimes I’d even think “oh my goodness, what is wrong with Stephen King, why did he write in a child orgy?”

So, for those who don’t know, It tells the story of a small, rural American town in which an otherworldly entity manifests and wrecks havoc on the population for its own satisfaction/survival… except nobody in the world, even the town’s citizens, ever seem to realise that there have been so many violent and horrific incident taking place there. Most iconically, ‘It’ takes the form of Pennywise the clown, who comes after the main group of characters (seven kids who call themselves The Losers Club). The story jumps around in time, and we see them learning about It and getting ready to face It as children, as well as returning to their hometown as wary adults because It seems to have returned.

There are some bits about how friendships grow and change after childhood, but how they remain important into adulthood which I thought were quite beautiful. Indeed, many of the bits about them becoming friends and whiling away their time in childish ways were so appealing to me, that I sometimes thought it didn’t need the supernatural horror at all. The human drama was well-written and I felt invested in all of their relationships – by far, this was my favourite thing about It.

Something that was more hit and miss, was the story’s side-steps. There were various flashbacks and scenes of horrific events caused by It, which weren’t directly connected to the main storyline. Some were quite interesting, others were quite bland, and some felt needlessly gratuitous. What I didn’t like, for example, were stories about homophobic or racial violence, which was attributed to the presence of It. The thing is, such awful things don’t need to be attributed to a supernatural evil, because they happen all the time in the real world, and using them to heighten the sense of horror surrounding the titular monster just feels a little bit too exploitive – putting violence against minority groups in there just for the shock factor.

Having said that, I don’t mean to accuse Stephen King of being racist or homophobic himself. Generally speaking, I would say the book is fairly progressive in that regard, because those violent acts of prejudice are always condemned – along with domestic violence too. So while I am glad to see these things being rightly criticised, even in a slightly older piece of writing, I’d still question using such awful real world horrors to primarily reinforce the evil of Pennywise. I am not against writers tackling these subjects by any means, but it felt just a little tasteless.

As for the horror itself – it was a little too in-your-face for me. The descriptions of the terrifying forms that It took were never particularly creepy in my mind. Some people, I’m sure, will get the shivers when they read descriptions of scary monsters and lots of gore, but I prefer horror that doesn’t show too much. Creepiness that only becomes apparent when you read between the lines. Having said that, I still felt some degree of tension during these scenes, because I cared about the characters and I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them.

I should also mention the infamous “child orgy” scene, which was really uncomfortable to read and completely unnecessary. I won’t spoil the full context as it’s near the end, but basically, the one female character in the main group of friends has sex with all the male characters, one after the other, and they’re all around ten or eleven years old. There’s a really loose story reason for all this, which felt very forced, and I don’t think this should have been included. The ‘reason’ that it was included, which I won’t spoil, kind of conveys a rather old fashioned (and in my mind, harmful) attitude about sex.

Overall, I am glad that I read this book. There are several aspects of it that I really admire Stephen King for. There are also, however, several aspects that are irritating – long tangents and things that we know about in far too much detail (the whole history of a river, loads of details on the contents of one character’s medicine cabinet, etc). It can often feel annoying when you want the story to move on, but you’re stuck reading about some historic event. I think what Stephen King wanted to do, was make Derry (the book’s setting) really feel like a real location, but in the process, gave us far too much information, which pads the book out significantly. There are some nuggets in here, for sure, but mining through to find them will sometimes feel like a chore.

Rating: 6.9/10

This is the first volume of Sixth Doctor comic strips that were originally published in Doctor Who Magazine. Significantly, these stories introduce Frobisher, the Doctor’s shapeshifting companion who spends most of his time in the form of a penguin. Frobisher is absolutely delightful, and I enjoyed the adventures of the two of them. Here’s an overview of each story in the collection.

The Shape Shifter by Steve Parkhouse

The first story in the collection sees Frobisher tracking down the Doctor because of a bounty on him – naturally, the two of them end up working together. It’s a tongue-in-cheek detective style story and it’s good fun seeing Frobisher using his powers to mess with the Doctor. One panel shows him pretending to be a bath while the Doctor gets in him – hilarious. A bit bare-bones, but a good introduction.

Voyager by Steve Parkhouse

This was a really interesting and trippy story. Here the Doctor and Frobisher encounter a man named Astrolabus, a mysterious individual in possession of a collection of ancient star charts. The Doctor has nightmares about a bizarre entity named Voyager, and it seems Astrolabus has some connection to him. I won’t say much, but it gets into the lore of the Doctor Who universe really nicely.

Polly the Glot by Steve Parkhouse

Here the Doctor and Frobisher get involved in a movement to protect an alien species known as Zyglots. Not bad by any means, but less interesting than most of the others in the collection – though it does keep the previous storyline about Astrolabus going.

Once Upon a Time-Lord by Steve Parkhouse

The start of this story was a little bit confusing, because it felt like it was continuing after another story that should have gone between this and Polly the Glot, but it didn’t. But, that aside, this was a fun story that sees the Doctor and Frobisher entering the word of fairy tales. Another very trippy one, and a nice example of a story that could really only work on the comic format (with some panels kind of morphing into a storybook). This also brings a close to the story arc about Astrolabus, in an unexpectedly dark and twisted way.

War-Game by Alan McKenzie

This story sees the Doctor and Frobisher getting sold into slavery on a planet that feels a bit like a generic fantasy setting. Things pick up a little bit when a Draconian character is introduced, as I have always liked that species. All-in-all though, this was one of the less notable stories in the collection.

Funhouse by Alan McKenzie

Another mind-bending story that sees the Doctor and Frobisher inside a strange inter-dimensional funhouse. I don’t want to spoil any of the unexpected surprises, but there are lots of fun references to the past in this one. Definitely one of my favourites in this volume.

Kane’s/Abel’s/The Warrior’s/Frobisher’s Story by Alan McKenzie

This final story is a grand finale that sees the Doctor working together with old friends from previous stories in this volume, as well as reuniting with Peri, in order to help combat the Skeletoids – an evil race so powerful that even the Daleks and the Cybermen have fallen to their might. It’s a really cool story to round off the collection with and I was pleased to see Peri added to the mix (even if her presence is a headache for the timeline).

I think fans of the Sixth Doctor will definitely get a lot of this volume, and really I think any Doctor Who fan with an interest in the expanded universe should give it a try so that they can get to know Frobisher. He’s such an iconic character and I love that the Doctor travelled with a penguin for a while. The stories are weird and quite unlike anything that would have been on TV in this era, and I think that’s exactly what Doctor Who comics should be.

Rating: 8.1/10