BASIC PLOT
There is no such thing as a good night. You may think you can hide away in dreams. Safely tucked up in bed, nothing can touch you. But, as every child knows, there are bad dreams. And that dreams are where the monsters are. The Doctor knows all about monsters. And he knows that sometimes they can still be there when you wake up. And when the horror is more than just a memory, there is nowhere to hide.

DOCTOR
Eighth.

COMPANIONS
Fitz and Trix.

MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
Pg 124 On the High Street, in a town presumably in England, presumably the present day. Do you know how annoying it is when authors don't give any details about where their stories are set?

PREPARATORY READING
None.

CONTINUITY REFERENCES
Pg 24 "I've always had a liking for hot, sweet tea - like the army makes." Probably a leftover from his UNIT days. He certainly didn't seem to like it in the novelisation of The Invasion.

Pg 28 "Gobstopper? [...] Jelly babies, then!" As carried by the second and fourth Doctors, respectively.

Pg 39 "In my experience children like to be scared, occasionally." As the various production team members stated when discussing the horrific nature of the show during the Hinchcliffe era.

Pg 51 "A Venusian translation of Beatrix Potter" We met the Venusians in Venusian Lullaby.

"Lying in the corner was the splintered remains of a violin" The Year of Intelligent Tigers

"Humanian era, early twenty-first century..." The TARDIS is still using the eras identified in The Telemovie. Enjoy this, it's the last time.

Pg 64 "Professor X is on UK Gold tonight and I don't want to miss it." Professor X was the TV show that was basically Doctor Who in the NA universe. Presumably it was revived in 2005.

Pg 69 Reference to Professor X.

Pg 71 The Doctor has an everlasting felt-tip. Presumably from the same box that had everlasting matches (Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks) and everlasting cigarettes (Blood Harvest).

Pg 72 "You have clearly never had a teenage daughter, Doctor." Not true, he had Miranda in Father Time, who recently died in Sometime Never...

Pg 83 "But I know for a fact that someone up there is waving back, with all six arms!" Probably an Alpha Centaurian, as seen in The Curse and Monster of Peladon, and Legacy.

Pg 89 "I once saw a grey lady in the engine room. But that could have been Trix, mucking about." Possibly, if it was Trix between Time Zero and Timeless, when she was lurking inside the TARDIS, but possibly some other uncertain reference.

"It was, allegedy, a gift from Sir Winston Churchill, 'For Special Services'." Presumably during or after Players.

Pg 90 "One evening I decided to check the helmic regulators." Mentioned in The Ark in Space.

"It was an old man. I can't be sure, but he seemed to be wearing dark, Victorian clothes. He had long, white hair swept back from his head." This sounds a lot like the first Doctor (except that the first Doctor was wearing Edwardian clothes), although for some reason he has the face of a skull. It's not clear why, especially as this passage has no relevance to the rest of the book.

"Hell's teeth, Doc" For some reason sixties Englander Fitz has picked up made-up eighties Australian vernacular. This was invented for the show to given Tegan some acceptably Australian-sounding not-quite-swearwords. As far as we know Fitz has never been to Australia, but maybe he was hanging out on the Barnett Bypass in 1981. You never know, he's a well-travelled guy.

Pg 119 "'The Doctor once told me that everything is a coincidence,' said Fitz thoughtfully." Uncertain reference.

Pg 126 "My vision is impaired." As the Daleks are fond of saying.

Pg 129 "The man in the mirror laughed softly, like a wolf who had been asked for directions by a lost, lonely little pig. [...] The bearded man chuckled dangerously." The Doctor has a vision of The Master, last seen (maybe) in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. And, although it almost certainly can't be, given the publication date, in hindsight this looks suspiciously like a Bad Wolf reference.

"Or perhaps there's something or someone inside me who wants to be free." There is, as we'll discover in The Gallifrey Chronicles.

Pg 133 "There was even an art gallery, which impressed her deeply." Also "something that looked like a plant, but turned around and watched you as you walked past." Both these were seen in The Invasion of Time.

Pg 134 "Another switch had fast return written on it." Seen in The Edge of Destruction and The Witch Hunters.

Pg 135 "Water is extremely rare on the planet Eskon" Seen in Coldheart.

"The atomic number of beryllium is 4. Clocks! I love clocks, don't you?" This word association is clearly triggered by the Telemovie and its beryllium alarm clock.

Pg 170 "Trix began to look through the stuff in the medical cabinet. 'Will this do?' she asked, holding up a strangely striped bandage." As seen in The Edge of Destruction.

Pg 248 "'It's been an exciting time for the human race, the last couple of centuries,' argued the Doctor. 'I was here for the last one - all of it - and I enjoyed every minute. Well, almost every minute." The Earth arc (The Burning through Escape Velocity).

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
None.

NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
Hazel, Cal and Jade McKeown, Bernard Harris, Uncle Tommo, Lewis.

CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

1. Pg 56 "He turned around and mock saluted her as they waked up to path." Huh?
2. Pg 69 "Hazel gave a lot of credit to alternative medicine" Which is odd, because on page 31 she dismissed the Doctor by saying "Unbelievable. I mean what are you? Some sort of homeopathic doctor? A faith healer?"
3. Pg 78 "Fitz had lost track of the time he had spent in the Doctor's TARDIS. It felt like years; in fact, it must have been years." Er, it's clearly been years. He was 27 in The Taint (pg 1) and 33 in Camera Obscura (p123). Even allowing for the fact that he might not be counting his three years with the Chinese army (Revolution Man), why does he imagine that only a year has passed?
4. And why has Fitz lost track of the amount of time now, when he knew it in Camera Obscura and only a few months have passed since the alternate universe arc began, as established in The Tomorrow Windows (pg 71)?
5. Pg 111 The Doctor acts as though he hasn't heard about Old Man Crawley telling Cal ghost stories, despite being told about it on page 39.
6. Pg 157 "'It's an old Red Indian trick,' said the Doctor tersely."It's not a continuity cock-up, but why would the Doctor use a term as racist as "Red Indian"?
7. Pg 170 "Both she and Fitz knew full well that, while the Doctor's areas of expertise were phenomenally eclectic, he had never claimed to be a medical doctor." Which is odd, because he claimed precisely this in The Sleep of Reason (pg 192), just one book previous.
8. Pg 174 Someone knocks on the TARDIS door and the Doctor just lets them in, without checking the scanner and is then surprised to discover Hazel and her son. Okay, it's not a cock-up, more an act of stupidity.
9. Pg 186 "He was halfway up the stairs when the door was flung open and a bull terrior knocked him clean off his feet." It's not clear what a "terrior" is.

PLUGGING THE HOLES [Fan-wank theorizing of how to fix continuity cock-ups]

1. Cal and Jade are quite sleepy from their difficult night, so they're still waking up as they leave the house.
2. Hazel likes to think she gives alternative medicine a lot of credit, but when she's distressed the truth comes out.
3. Fitz has been drinking wine, when he prefers beer (pg 77), so he's confused about the amount of relative time that's passed.
4. The wine is also making it harder than usual to calculate time.
5. The Doctor's preoccupied.
6. The Doctor's been known to make occasional racist comments before, most notably in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, so this isn't necessarily out of character. It's still pretty ugly though.
7. The Doctor only claimed to be medically trained, not to be a medical doctor. So perhaps he started his degree and never actually graduated. Which actually covers a multitude of sins on this score, so we're sticking with this one.
8. The eighth Doctor might be an amnesiac, but he clearly associates not checking the scanner with good things, given that that was how he came into being, in The Telemovie.
9. Possibly it's some sort of alien extrusion of the other-dimensional hybrid. Presumably it's only coincidence that, shortly after this, a terrier appears in the scene.

FEATURED ALIEN RACES
Pg 267 A hybrid alien from another universe. In its natural state it is huge, with tentacles like a jellyfish, splaying out tendrils like a bright crown. In our dimension it was split in two: one half was transparent, silent ectoplasm, the other half formed itself from a combination of soil and tree-roots and worms.

FEATURED LOCATIONS
A town and the nearby woods, presumably in England, presumably the present day. Although at least we know from page 145 that it's the middle of November and the various appearances of mobile phones suggest that it's very likely the present day. (Page 248 indicates that it's at least the twenty-first century and is also one of the few places that nails down that it's Earth, in case you were wondering.) But have I mentioned how annoying it is when authors don't give any details about where their stories are set?

Pg 267 Within an alternate universe belonging to the alien hybrid.

IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
The Deadstone Memorial is one of the best Doctor Who novellas ever written. Sadly, that makes it only a slightly above average novel, as there's far too much padding to sustain its central conceit. The conceit is a great one: a tiny setting, centred around one very ordinary family and their very ordinary fears. That it almost gets away with it is testament to the power behind this idea, but sadly it all goes to pieces at the end, as the climax keeps being pushed back so the page count can be filled up. A shame, because there's some great stuff here otherwise.