Joyride (novel)

Joyride
Main character(s):	Ram, Charlie, Quill, April, Tanya
Featuring:	Matteusz, Varun, Jackie
Main enemy:	Garry Fletcher
Main setting:	Shoreditch, London, October 2016
Key crew
Writer:	Guy Adams
Cover by:	Head Design
Release details
Release number:	1
Release date:	27 October 2016
Format:	Paperback, Epub, 272 pages
ISBN:	ISBN 1-78594-186-0 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-4735-3062-1 (Epub)
BBC Class novels
Next →	The Stone House

Joyride was the first release in the BBC Class novels series. It was written by Guy Adams, who had written for Doctor Who and Torchwood previously.

Publisher's summary

"So, can you just leap into other people's bodies? Take them over? And while you’re in control, you can do whatever you want? Brilliant."

Poppy is a quiet girl, right up until she steals a car and drives it through a shop window.

Max is a nice guy, but then he kills his whole family. Just for fun.

Amar always seems so happy, so why is he trying to jump to his death from the school roof?

Some of the students of Coal Hill School are not themselves. Some of them are dying. Ram has just woken up in a body he doesn't recognise, and if he doesn't figure out why he may well be next.

Plot

to be added

Characters

• Ram Singh
• Charlie Smith
• Miss Quill
• April MacLean
• Tanya Adeola
• Matteusz Andrzejewski
• Garry Fletcher
• Steve Hopley
• Jackie MacLean
• Jarvis Adeola
• Damon Adeola
• Varun Singh
• Veronica Cutler
• Toby Moore
• Poppy
• Max Collins
• Tommy Collins
• Amar Sai
• Viola Cummings
• John O'Donnell
• James Banks
• Barry Taylor
• Imogen Farmer
• Danielle Westby
• Lowe
• George Barker
• Mandy Taylor
• WPC Delano
• Stephen Patrick
• Gregson
• Mike
• Veltham
• Cheryl O'Donnell
• Sandra
• Nigel
• Garth Todd
• Alien pilot

Worldbuilding

Individuals

• Ram's mother is called Janeeta.
• One of the first boyfriends of Garry Fletcher's mother was a squaddie.
• Fletcher often buys doner and chips from Ranesh at the local kebab shop.
• Damon Adeola wonders if he should tell his mother Vivian about the strange call from Ram.

Locations

Shoreditch locations

• Poppy works at the supermarket Morefields.
• Mandy Taylor works at a betting shop on High Street.
• Stan is the manager of Pig & Lettuce bar, sometimes visited by Gary Fletcher.
• Fletcher's company Joyriders is set in a former industrial estate that can be reached from Swallow Avenue via a small access road.
• Fletcher picks up James Banks and Barry Taylor at Old Street station.
• O'Donnell in Ram's body runs along Great Eastern Street.
• Ram cuts through Leonard Street on the way from Great Eastern Street to Swallow Avenue.

Other locations

• Stephen Patrick bets on horse races in Aintree.
• George Barker is offered a return ticket to Basildon.
• Quill takes the Central line to get home.
• When Ram walks along Swallow Avenue, he finds himself on Old Street.
• Barry Taylor assumes that, since Charlie is an alien, he must be from Mars.
• Fletcher drops Mrs Cummings at Barbican.
• Mike was thrown under a tube train at Edgware Road.
• Fletcher plans to run away to Dubai after making enough money.
• Steve once had a girlfriend from Leeds. He thinks of running away with his family to Leeds or Manchester.
• James Banks transferred to a body of an eighteen-year-old from Brixton.

Technology

• Poppy tries to break a window of a silver Honda. Ram thinks that nobody would like to change a Porsche for a Fiat.
• The London Transport machine won't top up Miss Quill's Oyster card.
• Charlie owns an iPad.
• Max Collins plays Xbox with his headphones on not to disturb his parents.
• Max and Tommy Collins' parents use secateurs and trowels for gardening.
• Imogen Farmer removes the battery from the smoke alarm in the Collins' house to prevent it from going off.
• The news about Max Collins spreads from one Wi-Fi network to another.
• Quill throws a biro cap in Lowe's forehead.
• Mike brings a petrol powered generator that can deliver electricity up to 230 volts.
• Fletcher uses a lump hammer and Mike uses a crowbar to kill the aliens.
• Steve tells Fletcher he thinks Joyriders does some VR thing.
• Ram surmises that the body-swapping technology cannot be bought in an Apple Store.
• Not all humans know how to split an atom.
• It is strange for Ram to be without a mobile phone.
• Buses use hydraulic brakes.

Police

• Poppy's body is removed from the car by SOCOs.

Media

• Quill observes many passengers with copies of Metro.
• Tanya checks Buzzfeed and uses Facebook.

Organisations

• Matteusz suggests a possibility of donating money on JustGiving.
• Mike owns a company named Sparkz Mobile Disco.
• A UNIT team are brought in to take away Fletcher's alien technology.

Culture

• A splatter from a skull shot through by a bullet in a computer game is compared to paintings by Jackson Pollock.
• Tommy Collins is wearing Iron Man pyjamas.
• Ram compares his being in somebody else's body to a Ryan Reynolds movie where he swaps with Jason Bateman, who gets to be Ryan Reynolds and decides not to have sex with Olivia Wilde.
• Toby Moore remarks that viola, the first name of Viola Cummings, is a musical instrument.
• Quill and Charlie hear sounds of an acoustic guitar.

Science

• Quill assigns calculating centripetal force as homework.

Food and drinks

• April burns a Hawaiian pizza.
• When April comes to school, her breath smells of vodka. She says she is "not the one to down whisky when things get messy."
• Garry Fletcher orders chicken Chow Mein.

Animals

• Tanya thinks about a small dog attacking an Alsatian.
• Damon notes that Swallow Avenue has the same name as a bird.
• Steve scrunches himself into a ball like a hedgehog.

Notes

• The UK print erroneously refers to Coal Hill as "Coal Hill School". It is also inconsistent in spelling April's surname, giving the correct "MacLean" on some occasions and an incorrect "MacClean". The US print corrects the misspellings of April's surname to their proper form, but does not correct the references of Coal Hill as a school.
• In this story, the alien presence in Shoreditch is not related to the Rift at Coal Hill Academy: the aliens arrived using their own space/time travelling technology six months prior to the events of TV: For Tonight We Might Die.
• This story must take place between The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo and Nightvisiting: Matteusz hasn't yet moved in with Charlie as would happen in the latter, and Coal Hill is in-between head teachers, meaning Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart hasn't happened either.

Audiobook cover.

Audio release

• The story was released as an unabridged 6x CD audiobook along with the US version of the novel by Blackstone Audio and HarperCollins with Quill Tree Books as imprint on 3 October 2017, read by Steve West.

Continuity

• Miss Quill fought the Rhodians and became a slave to the Rhodian prince. Then both of their people were wiped out by the Shadow Kin. (TV: For Tonight We Might Die)
• The Twelfth Doctor saved Charlie and Miss Quill and tasked Charlie, Matteusz and the others with protecting people. Charlie and Matteusz discuss him and refer to him as "the man from space... the impossible man". (TV: For Tonight We Might Die)
• April MacLean shares a heart with an alien king. (TV: For Tonight We Might Die)
• At the prom, Ram Singh's girlfriend Rachel was killed by Corakinus, who also chopped his leg off, which is now replaced by an alien prosthetic limb. (TV: For Tonight We Might Die) Unlike his friends, Ram does not want to talk about it. (TV: The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo)
• Ram's football skills have taken a serious hit due to the alien prosthetic limb. (TV: The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo)
• Ram remembers the deaths and gore surrounding the situation with Coach Dawson. (TV: The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo)
• Tanya plays a computer game with her brother Jarvis. (TV: The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo, Nightvisiting)
• Tanya checks out Seraphin's videos. (PROSE: What She Does Next Will Astound You)
• April's father intentionally crashed their car with her and her mother on board. All three survived it, but Jackie ended up in a wheelchair. (TV: Nightvisiting)
• Varun Singh already knows what really happened to his son at the prom. (TV: The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo)

External links

• Official Joyride page at Penguin Books