Written by Terrance Dicks, based on Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln’s scripts for the 1967 TV serial.

Not really a prologue, but the opening scene is instantly gripping, establishing Travers as a Professor Challenger figure, and the Yeti as a horrifying, powerful threat. This is the first novelisation of a story that wasn’t either scripted or script edited by its author, and probably reflects the abiding impact of the Yeti on the imagination of a generation of kids.

Although Doctor Patrick had appeared briefly in the prologue to The Auton Invasion and again, on screen, in The Day of the Daleks, this is his first full-fledged novel. Dicks uses the familiar description, “a middle-aged, middle-sized man with a gentle, rather comical face and a shock of untidy black hair.” and takes great delight in describing Troughton’s mannerisms. He also introduces Jamie and Victoria with a precis of their backstories, gives Jamie some Scottish-sounding dialect and Victoria a bit of spirit (especially compared to her tediously “solemn” crush, Thomni).

There are broadly two types of successful novelisations: the ones that expand and embellish the scripts and those which aim to reproduce the serials while carefully editing the longueurs or less effective elements. This is decidedly the latter, turning an occasionally plodding TV story into a scary, fast-paced horror. It’s the equivalent of Hammer Films converting one of the BBC’s six-part Quatermass serials into a punchy, 80-minute movie. Dicks includes moments of almost Lovecraftian cosmic horror when Travers witnesses the manifestation of the Intelligence: “The thought flashed through Travers’ confused mind that the pyramid was really a sort of gateway, a channel between some other, alien universe and this one. And that the other universe was pouring this evil substance through to this one. Pouring and pouring and pouring endlessly. Soon it would envelop the whole world…”

The pace quickens towards the climax, and the climactic battle of wills between the Doctor and the Intelligence. I remember being thrilled by the scene of the Doctor being tied to the monastery gates as Yeti bait and later being crushed between a Yeti and its control sphere. Truly scary . Grade 1

Next Time: Doctor Who And… The Curse of Peladon