The Deviant Strain (2005) Review

The Deviant Strain is somewhere between mediocre and kinda decent. Most of you probably haven't heard of it, but it's a short Ninth Doctor novel taking place between The Doctor Dances and Boom Town.

The setting is the Russian naval base in the Novrosk Peninsula. The date is left mostly vague, but I believe it's somewhere in the 1980s. The TARDIS picks up a distress signal from somewhere in the area and Jack thoughtlessly responds to it, forcing the Doctor to go and rescue whoever's trapped.

The first issue I have with the book is that despite only being 250 pages long, it is slow. Very, very slow. It's almost as if the author is trying to pad out a 45-minute script. Who knows? The story takes half the book to build up(the first half focusing on various parts of the Russian community which no offense, I don't give a crap about. Mostly cause I live 5 kilometers from Russia.). Again, as an episode, it works because of the dark visuals that the author is trying to convey, but as a book, it makes me wish I was reading about Daleks or Cybermen or even the Sontarans. Anything, but long descriptions of horrible Russian submarines and their cold weather! This is Doctor Who, not Dokmop Kmo, thank you very much!

However, when we finally get some action, it's pretty darn cool. From that point on, The Deviant Strain plays out like a combination of a zombie movie, The Blob and The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. The climax is a bit underplayed with no "epic solution" that I've come to expect from Matt Smith episodes, but instead a simple explanation of how the heroes won as the bad guys die.

Now, the Ninth Doctor... I can easily imagine Eccleston saying most of his dialogue in my head(there are some exceptions, but I have no complaints) so he's written fine. However, all of his gimmicks curiously only appear once. He uses psychic paper to get into the village, he uses the sonic screwdriver to open a submarine door and he yells his catchphrase once towards the end. It's either a big coincidence or the author had a list of things to tick off so it'd work more as a Ninth Doctor book.
Oh yeah, speaking of that, there's also the obligatory Bad Wolf.

Overall, not too bad, but nothing I'd go back to unless it was filmed. If you want another Eccleston episode, this pretty much does the job.
P.S. Whoever wrote the summary on the back cover did not read the book itself. "They must discover who is really responsible for the Deviant Strain..."  It's a reference to the spaceship only using humans(they are the deviant strain) as its power source instead of other stuff.