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Christmas: a time for home, family and laughter... Everybody
has special memories of Christmas, but for others it brings
shadows of things that should not have been: unearthly visitors
who open their eyes to new worlds and new experiences, pantomime
coats, robot dogs and a big blue box parked beneath the Christmas
tree. Some think these fleeting guests are apparitions. Some
think they are angels. Some think they are demons. But all
know that Christmas will never be the same again. The Doctor
and his companions travel to Christmas Past, Christmas Present
and those Christmases Yet to Come. They bring festive cheer
and Yuletide joy, creeping dread and screaming horror, slipping
in and out of time like the ghosts of Christmas...
As
is common with these anthologies, there’s a degree of
stylistic and thematic hangover from the previous collection,
in this instance Short
Trips: Snapshots. Like all of the stories in
that collection, many of the tales in The Ghosts of Christmas
are told from the perspectives of characters other than the
Doctor and his companions. The full implications of the travellers’
exploits often remain a mystery to the observer (and, in the
case of Dan Abnett’s “For the Man Who Has Everything”
and Michael Abberton’s “Jigsaw”, a mystery
to the reader, too). These observers include a Home Secretary’s
PA in “For the Man Who Has Everything”; an electrical
engineer in Ann Kelly’s “The Cutty Wren”; the
original Aladdin in Jonathan Clements’s panto-themed
“The Nobility of Faith”; an old man in a care home
in Simon Barnard and Paul Morris’s “The Christmas
Presence”; shop workers in John Binns’s “Snowman
in Manhattan” and Mark Magrs’s “Christmas Every
Day?”; various eye-witnesses in “Jigsaw”; the
reluctant organiser of an office party in Trevor Baxendale’s
“Dr Cadabra”; an anxious expectant father in Iain
McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett’s “Far Away in a
Manger”; a starship stewardess in Eddie Robson’s
“Decorative Purposes”; and a terrified fugitive
in Steven Savile’s homage to virtually every zombie movie
ever made, “The Stars Our Contamination”.
Perhaps
not surprisingly, given the festive subject matter, the point
of view is frequently that of a child, as in Colin Harvey’s
“But Once a Year”, Ian Farrington’s “24
Crawford Street”, Neil Corry’s “Dear Great
Uncle Peter” (complete with BIG LETTERS for emphasis),
Xanna Eve Chown’s “Do You Believe in the Krampus?”,
Scott Handcock’s “They Fell” and Richard Salter’s
“The Crackers”.
Just
occasionally, though, the viewpoint character is one of the
Doctor’s companions or former companions: Ben Jackson
in Gary Russell’s “Do You Dream in Colour?”;
Tegan Jovanka in Joseph Lidster’s “Keeping it Real”;
and the Brigadier in the three-part story “Faithful Friends”,
penned by the editors, Cavan Scott and Mark Wright.
The
book itself is divided into three sections: “Christmas
Past”, “Christmas Present” and “Christmas
Yet to Come”, containing stories that deal respectively
with humanity’s past, present and future. “Christmas
Past” is characterised by ghostly tales, the spooks and
scares being caused by extra-terrestrial artefacts (as in
“But Once a Year”), alien presences (as in Scott
Matthewman’s “Tell Me You Love Me”) or temporal
rifts (as in Peter Anghelides’s “The Sommerton Fetch”).
Alien artefacts and/or presences are still in evidence during
“Christmas Present”, though the stories have a decidedly
more oddball flavour to them: memory-stealing centipedes in
“Dear Great Uncle Peter”; a figure from Austrian
folklore in “Do You Believe in the Krampus?”; the
Second Doctor playing Santa in “The Christmas Presence”;
a possessed toy in “Snowman in Manhattan”; and the
Sixth Doctor standing in for a missing magician in “Dr
Cadabra”. Futuristic ways of marking the season are a
recurring theme of “Christmas Yet to Come”, including
genetically modified trees and fairies in “Decorative
Purposes”; an entire fake Christmassy town in “Keeping
it Real”; and a dreadful consumerist culture in which
Christmas shopping dominates each and every week, in “Christmas
Every Day?”
Knitting
these sections together like the yarn of a festive pullover
is the three-part “Faithful Friends”, which precedes
the first two sections and rounds off the collection at the
end. However, Paul Cornell fans might be upset to learn that
the elderly Brigadier of “Faithful Friends: Part Three”
has outlived his wife Doris. This contradicts Cornell’s
New Adventures novel Happy Endings, in which
the Brig is rejuvenated, and the same author’s Eighth
Doctor novel The Shadows of Avalon, in which Alistair
outlives Doris. Perhaps the Brigadier of “Part Three”
has grown old for a second time, and the Doctor has brought
his guests from the past...
A
more minor, internal inconsistency crops up in Scott Alan
Woodard’s “All Snug in Their Beds” and in “Keeping
it Real”. In the first story, the Fourth Doctor wraps
up against sub-zero temperatures, whereas in the second tale,
the Fifth Doctor is said to not usually be troubled by the
cold. Ironically, this situation is the reverse of an inconsistency
in the TV series: the Fourth Doctor is unaffected by the Antarctic
chill in The Seeds of Doom, whereas the Fifth Doctor
detects “a nip in the air” in Time-Flight
(and the Sixth Doctor really suffers inside a cold-storage
room in Attack
of the Cybermen).
Evidently the Doctor’s resistance to low temperatures
varies from time to time, perhaps due to some as-yet unexplained
Gallifreyan biological rhythm.
Like
a box of festive chocolates, some stories are tastier and
more memorable than others. My personal favourites (the orange
crèmes, so to speak) are “Dear Great Uncle Peter”,
“Snowman in Manhattan” and “Dr Cadabra”.
Also well worth sampling are “Tell Me You Love Me”,
“The Nobility of Faith”, “24 Crawford Street”
(despite the repeated misspelling of lava), “The Sommerton
Fetch” (which includes an amusing Terrance Dicks-style
description of the “young-old” Third Doctor), “The
Christmas Presence”, “The Crackers”, “All
Snug in Their Beds”, “Decorative Purposes”
and “Christmas Every Day?”
With
more than twenty stories to choose from, it really can be
Christmas every day - or at least most of the month.
Richard
McGinlay
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