Synopsis: Time experiments in an old priory resurrect an ancient evil. The Doctor and Leela arrive just as the manifestations begin – an image of the Fendahl, a legend from the Doctor’s own people that brings with it death – but how can they kill death itself?

Chapter Titles

• 1 The Skull
• 2 Dead Man in the Wood
• 3 Time Scan
• 4 Horror at the Priory
• 5 The Fendahleen
• 6 The Coven
• 7 Stael’s Mutiny
• 8 The Missing Planet
• 9 Ceremony of Evil
• 10 The Priestess
• 11 Time Bomb
• 12 The End of the Fendahl

Background: Terrance Dicks adapts scripts from 1978 by Chris Boucher.

Notes: We start with an introduction to the fated walker, who recalls a rhyme about a ‘frightful fiend’ on a ‘lonely road’. It’s not exactly confirmed onscreen but Colby is a professor, while Professor Fendelman has become ‘Fendleman’. Thea Ransome is described as being ‘strikingly attractive’, while Max Stael has ‘stiff Germanic good looks’ and ‘rather woodenly handsome features’ (which feels like a dig at actor Scott Fredericks). 

We’re reminded where K9 came from, although this story doesn’t necessarily follow on immediately from The Invisible Enemy, as K9 has ‘developed some mysterious ailment’. Leela (or maybe just the narrator) wonders if the Doctor’s love of Earth wore off when he was exiled there by the Time Lords (let’s hope it’s the narrator as Leela wouldn’t know this) and Leela recalls her trip to a music hall [See The Talons of Weng Chiang]. Dicks explains the joke behind calling Colby’s dog ‘Leakey’, a tribute to ‘the famous anthropologist’. 

Security Team leader Mitchell’s first name is Harry. By the way, in both the TV serial and this book, Stael is ordered to call ‘Hartman’ in London to send a security team to the priory; I’m calling this now with zero evidence – Hartman works for Torchwood.

Cover: John Geary paints the Doctor being menaced by a fendahleen in front of a grandfather clock in a wooden-panelled room.

Final Analysis: I remember reading this accompanied by a fan-made audio recording of the TV episodes and I managed to pretty much keep time with the programme. It’s a slim volume, possibly the slimmest, and it’s by no means as gory as it could have been, but Dicks maintains the horror levels rather nicely for a children’s book: The Doctor considers his first view of an adult fendahleen to be ‘the nastiest looking life-form he had ever seen’.

In shape it was vaguely like an immensely thick snake, though the segmented front gave a suggestion of a caterpillar. It was green, and glistening, and it seemed to move on a trail of slime, like a shell-less snail.

Later, the ‘green slimy skin’ of a dead fendahleen is said to have ‘burst in several places like rotting fruit’ – nice!