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Reviews for Ghost Ship

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Ghastly shit

By:Phil Ince, Highbury
Date:Monday 16 February 2004
Rating:   2

Topping completely misses the story inside this tale. What if there is an afterlife? Is there such a thing as a soul? Are there consequences after death of the way a life is lived?

Now that's something to be afraid of.

Instead, Topping has written a novelisation of a late-60s Hammer horror in which Baker was the star. Blood runs down walls, skulls laugh and scream, every lame cliche of teen horror movies is present. Cardboard stalks the galleys and corridors of the Queen Mary in the stiff shape of stereotypes.

The 4th Doctor is travelling alone - apparantly "wracked with guilt" - after 'Deadly Assassin'. Disasterously toneless, the 1st person narrator repeatedly and entirely unconvincingly describes himself as afraid and yet with no clear explanation as to why.

After all this man has seen, there isn't the slightest persuasive rationale for his terror.

Atrocious.



Had great potential

By:Paula, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA
Date:Saturday 18 November 2006
Rating:   7

Interesting story with great potential, great build up with a rather quiet lackluster ending. But I enjoyed reading it.



Has the author ever seen an episode?

By:Rhonda Knight, Hartsville, United States
Date:Friday 1 August 2014
Rating:   3

First, 1st person narration with any Doctor is a mistake. This voice esp. does not sound like the Fourth Doctor at all. Too brooding and introspective.



Misfire

By:David Layton, Los Angeles, United States
Date:Monday 4 April 2016
Rating:   3

"Ghost Ship" is an attempt at a traditional 19th-century or early 20th-century style horror story. Doctor 4 traveling alone lands on the Queen Mary in the early 1950s to find that there are ghosts lurking around the mysterious Cabin 672. In this respect, the story is not all that interesting since it adds nothing new to the genre and mostly just follows the cliches, down to the mad scientist at the heart of it all. What really brings down the story is having it narrated by The Doctor himself. Topping never gets the voice or character right. It is like having The Doctor wear a different skin, one that would be good for the narrator of a standard horror story. The mismatch between character and narrator is just too great to be overlooked.



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