Written by Philip Hinchcliffe, based on Robert Banks Stewart’s scripts for the 1976 TV serial.

Like the TV serial it’s based on, this is very much a tale of two halves. The first half dozen chapters, mostly focused on the Antarctic expedition, are charitably described as “workmanlike”, with very simple prose and much less embellishment than Terrance Dicks would add even at his least engaged. There’s no real building of suspense or atmosphere, just a straightforward summary of what happened, and no wry asides – any wit comes directly from Robert Banks Stewart’s scripted lines. Instead of Dicks’ pithy descriptions you get the Doctor as “a very strange and powerful person”.

But once the action transfers to Harrison Chase’s mansion in Britain you can almost sense Philip Hinchcliffe’s confidence and enthusiasm for the material growing. I think it’s clear he relishes the horror elements (most of the comic Amelia Ducat scenes are excised). Chase comes across like one of Dennis Wheatley’s occult villains: the Doctor senses “danger and evil” when they meet, and Hinchcliffe has fun with Chase’s growing madness. There are a few witty asides, like the moment when Chase describes the tonnes of organic matter required to feed his plans and “the Doctor, at that moment, felt decidedly organic”. The prose becomes more lurid: Sarah Jane leaps on Scoby’s arm “like a tigress”, and Dunbar reflects on his treachery: “Greed that ancient vice of man, had ensnared him into a lurid web of murder and betrayal. Now, in this tangled wilderness which plucked his clothes and tore at his skin, he was discovering the price of his folly.”

By the time he gets to the outright horror of the climax, Hinchcliffe is in full swing: “He caught the Krynoid in the full glare of the headlights. Its massive green trunk throbbed and pulsated, and the long clawing tentacles waved wildly in the air. In the split second it was discernible, this repulsive vision of unearthly terror burned itself into the Doctor’s mind, never to be forgotten.” I enjoyed these lip-smacking, Tod Slaughter sequences of melodramatic excess, even as I think the book as a whole is one of the weaker Targets. Grade 4.

Next Time: Doctor Who And… The Dalek Invasion of Earth.