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The Curse of Fenric was a novelisation based on the 1989 television serial The Curse of Fenric.
Publisher's summary
If this is a top secret naval camp, I'm Lord Nelson!
Ace has a poor opinion of the security arrangements at Commander Millington’s North Yorkshire base – and she’s less than comfortable in 1940s fashions. But the Doctor has graver matters on his mind.
Dr Judson, inventor of the Navy’s ULTIMA code-breaker, is using the machine to decipher the runic inscriptions in the crypt of the nearby church. Commander Millington is obsessed with his research into toxic bombs that he insists will hasten the end of World War Two.
A squad of the Red Army's crack Special Missions brigade lands on the Yorkshire coast with instructions to steal the ULTIMA device – unaware that Millington has turned it into a devastating secret weapon.
And beneath the waters at Maidens Point an ancient evil stirs...
The Doctor uncovers mysteries concealed within villainous plots – but what connects them all to a thousand-year-old curse?
Chapter titles
- Prologue: Dusk
- Chronicle I: Betrayal
- Document I: The Wolf-time
- Chronicle II: Dangerous Undercurrents
- Document II: The Curse of the Flask
- Chronicle III: Weapons within Weapons, Death within Death
- Document III: A Victorian Storyteller
- Chronicle IV: Vampire City!
- Document IV: The First Contest of Fenric
- Chronicle V: Wind and Water, Earth and Fire
Illustrations
- Includes a map.
Deviations from televised story
- The novelisation includes an epilogue that leaves Ace (now called Dorothee) in Paris. In the Virgin New Adventures novel Set Piece this sets out the events which lead up and into this eventuality.
- The way Haemoveres kill people is not fully described in the book. It cuts to the next scene just before the Haemoveres kill someone, but the victims bodies are described afterwards.
Writing and publishing notes
- Along with Remembrance of the Daleks, this commission was given an unlimited wordcount. In the light of the forthcoming range of New Adventures, new editor Peter Darvill-Evans encouraged the writers to take a more "grown up" approach to the story, in particular its underlying theme of adolescence and sexuality.
- As a result of the removal of a page limit, The Curse of Fenric, at 188, is the longest Doctor Who novelisation published under Target Books' traditional format; several later novelisations would be longer, but they would be published in a format similar to the NA line.
- Acknowledgment: "A story has many authors. Among the authors of this story were John Nathan-Turner (who indulged my flight of fantasy), Andrew Cartmel (who didn't) and a dozen teenagers in Ealing (for whom it was written). My gratitude to these and others – but especially to Andrew. IB".
- This paperback included a map of the flask's route.
British publication history
One single paperback edition, priced £2.50 (UK), estimated print run: 29,000 copies.