BASIC PLOT
There's a new drug on the street and Bernice and Ace are finding out the hard way that Warlock is the worst trip of all. A ruthless animal experimentation program is underway and someone has decided to play for higher stakes.

DOCTOR
Seventh.

COMPANIONS
Ace and Bernice.

MATERIALISATION CIRCUIT
Pg 15 The House on Allen Road (it disturbs the animals).

PREPARATORY READING
This is a sequel to Cat's Cradle: Warhead, although it doesn't really rely on its predecessor.

CONTINUITY REFERENCES
Pg 6 "Silicon chips which had been salvaged from a G-8 police hovercraft in New York" Cat's Cradle: Warhead.

"She selected a small silver teaspoon with RFC embossed on the handle" Redvers Fenn-Cooper, Ghost Light.

Pg 8 "Then past the apple tree which still showed the scars of an incident years ago when a car had exploded in the garden." Cat's Cradle: Warhead.

Pg 13 "Some idiot artist had changed the second L in Allen to an I." This happened in Cat's Cradle: Warhead as well.

Pg 21 "What had once been the stables on the estate had been converted in the 1920s into a garage" The stables are back by the time of Transit

Pg 24 "Oh well that's Cybertechnology for you." It's not certain where the Doctor picked up this bit of Cyberman technology.

Pg 103 "Webster insisted the place had been the scene of a small war" Cat's Cradle: Warhead.

Pg 152 "Aren't you Jimmy McIlveen's brother?" Jimmy appeared in Cat's Cradle: Warhead.

Pgs 197-199 "I needed a suitable weapon and I duly assembled one. It was a somewhat curious weapon. It consisted of two people." We get a summary of Cat's Cradle: Warhead.

Pg 261"'There used to be a pub here,' said Justine. 'It was called The Moonchild.'" See page 238 of Cat's Cradle: Warhead.

Pg 308 "I once appeared as a figure in the paranoid hallucination of a girl who was having an overdose." Cat's Cradle: Warhead.

Pg 327 "'After all,' said the Doctor, 'He's been through this before.'" Cat's Cradle: Warhead.

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
Vincent Wheaton and Justine reappear from Cat's Cradle: Warhead (as does the King Building and the House on Allen Road).

Mrs Woodcott appeared in a dream in Cat's Cradle: Warhead.

NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
Creed McIlveen, brother of James McIlveen who appeared in Cat's Cradle: Warhead. Creed goes on to appear in Warchild and Happy Endings.

Jack reappears in Warchild.

Dieter, Webster, Maxine, Paulie Keaton (although the latter might be about to die when we last see him).

(Justine is pregnant and her child Ricky later features in Warchild.)

CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

1. Pg 3 "But Chick had stayed. He'd been at the house for nearly a year now." At the end of Parasite (page 303), Ace decides to leave the Doctor at the first opportunity. So... she subsequently lived in her own time for a year and didn't find a suitable opportunity?
2. Pg 127 "The girl called Maxine's face was so close that Ace could hardly focus on it." Okay, this isn't a continuity cock-up, but it's still appallingly phrased.
3. Pg 205 "She moved closer to the Doctor to see if she could small the liquorice fragrance of the tablet." Say what?
4. Pgs 351-353 It's strongly implied that the Warlock-carrying spaceship that crashes in Russia is the Tunguska meteor. Except that this contradicts Birthright, where the Tunguska meteor is the Charrl coming to Earth.

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

1. Ace wants to leave but not in her own time. As we'll see next book.
2. DWB even quoted this line in their review.
3. We're being constantly told about how small the tablet is, as well as its smell. Warlock's so powerful it can even mix up these concepts in the mind of the author. That's one hell of a drug!
4. The Charrl event opened a gap between dimensions, so maybe the Warlock spaceship fell through the same gap.

FEATURED ALIEN RACES
Pgs 351-353 Warlock itself is an alien consciousness that crashed on Earth in Russia and located itself in mineral form.

FEATURED LOCATIONS
The House on Allen Road, Kent (where the TARDIS crew have been living for about a year before the novel begins). It's some years after Cat's Cradle: Warhead, so the early twenty-first century. (It's 2014 according to A History of the Universe.)

Pg 30 New York.

Pg 197 London.

Pg 234 Canterbury.

Pgs 351-353 A spaceship heading towards and crash-landing in Russia, sometime between the world wars, according to page (in flashback). But see Continuity Cock-Ups.

Pg 357 North of Canterbury.

IN SUMMARY - Robert Smith?
Warlock is astonishingly well written and despite being the longest NA, the story simply flies by. It's a heart-wrenchingly excellent tale, with Cartmel's gift for evocation in fine form. It also features the greatest and most tragic figure ever created for Doctor Who fiction: the Doctor's cat, Chick, who is undoubtedly the star of the book. The massive page count given to Creed doesn't hurt in the slightest. Ace and Benny get some decent subplots and there's so much going on you don't notice that the Doctor spends the entire novel sitting in his house. The drug stuff is fabulously done and even the anti animal experimentatiion theme and the scenes written from animals' POV, which would be heavy handed with any other author, are wonderful. Thoroughly gripping and well worth a reread.