‘I WAS A MONSTER!!!’

Please feel free to comment on my review.

The Capricorn Killer with the Fourth Doctor and Romana

This story is by Joseph Lidster and it features the Fourth Doctor and the second Romana. Now I want to stress that I do like Joseph Lidster as a ‘Doctor Who’ writer. I enjoyed his stories ‘The Reaping’ and ‘The Gathering’. From reading this short story, he writes mostly compelling prose and dialogue here.

However, ‘I Was a Monster!!!’ is more in the vein of ‘The Rapture’, which I don’t mind as a story but it wasn’t a favourite of mine when I heard it. I believe ‘I Was a Monster!!!’ was written before ‘The Rapture’, as ‘Short Trips: Zodiac’ was released in March 2002 and ‘The Rapture’ in September 2002.

In the story, a man who goes on a pub crawl gets attacked by a young woman who bites him on the neck and drinks his blood. I don’t know where this young woman came from but I assume she was a vampire and the man soon becomes a vampire himself, earning him the name: ‘the Capricorn Killer’.

There is an element of ‘Goth Opera’ about this story, although that was written by Paul Cornell. The story is also told with flashbacks and first-person narrative. There’s also a fictional book excerpt and a television script featured. The Fourth Doctor and Romana don’t appear in the tale till the very end.

The Doctor does become uncharacteristically ruthless in dealing with the Capricorn Killer, as he stabs him with a wooden stake without getting to know him. The story is also more in tone with ‘Torchwood’ as opposed to the light-hearted humour of the Douglas Adams period of ‘Doctor Who’.

‘I Was a Monster!!!’ rating – 6/10