#white darkness

white darkness (novel: 1993)

He has work! HE HAS WORK! NON-LOKI WORK!

It's a fucking miracle!

It is so cold, oh so cold inside this soul 

A layer of snow covers it all 

I try to dust it off but it melts, pools, freezes

So it´s worse 

Can’t seem to get up or find my stride 

On the cold ice I slip and slide

Sure I broke more than one of my legs

Maybe a rib or two 

Pretty sure I cracked my skull 

Snow keeps falling 

Never seems to end

So I just lie there

I am starting to feel numb

It will be the death of me, but I just watch enthralled

Ice, my deathbed and a blanket of beautiful snowflakes

White darkness envelops me. 

Book #103 of 2026:

Doctor Who: White Darkness by David A. McIntee (Virgin New Adventures #15)

Largely a back-to-basics reset for the series, bringing the Seventh Doctor and his companions Ace and Bernice to Haiti in 1915, amid the unrest that ultimately led to an American invasion and occupation of the island country. While not a straight historical adventure — cultists are trying to raise one of H. P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones, in the first explicit connection of that mythos to Doctor Who — it’s a pretty well-researched period piece that is generally content to get the protagonists caught up in various earthly intrigues and keep the wilder sci-fi business to a minimum. For most of the plot, the main threat isn’t even the unnamed extradimensional being lurking in the background, but rather that outsiders are appropriating and corrupting the traditional vodoun practices, researching ways to enhance the pharmacological properties that induce a pacifying ‘zombi’ state.

I had my hesitations about this story (especially once I realized the Lovecraftian angle), but I think it treats its subject fairly respectfully overall. There is overt racism in the text, including racial slurs, but our viewpoint time-travelers are firmly against such nonsense and one senses that author David A. McIntee was striving to write the Haitians as a real and multifaceted society to the best of his abilities. Plotwise it’s a bit overstuffed with characters and action beats that involve them running from one location to another, and other than the setting, it doesn’t really showcase the cleverness or ambition that I’d prefer in a work like this. But I’ve certainly seen worse from this franchise before.

[Content warning for slavery, suicide, gun violence, threat of rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆