I read a dozen  Doctor Who novelizations long before I ever saw a single episode of the actual show. My sister, who lived in England for a bit, told me about it and when I was in the third grade, I purchased novelization from a booth at a science fiction convention in Norfolk, Virginia.

Initially, the only novelizations available were a series of ten books published by Pinnacle. Nine of the ten were based on episodes featuring the Fourth Doctor, the inimitable Tom Baker (though one, the first one I ever read, Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, was actually a Third Doctor story on television).

I am re-reading a bunch of these.

Today, Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster.

Like a lot of novels, it was written by the producer who managed the show that particular season (and either wrote or had a hand in writing many of the scripts). As you can imagine, that person might have been busy, so yes, these are just dashed out novels. So stylewise, it’s pretty minimal. You read them because you’re fan.

The actually read a bit lit scripts, with occasional internal musings by the characters, as if the writer suddenly remembered that this would be read and not seen on the screen. So the style is your basic, propulsive pulp style – which is just fine with me, by the way.

When broadcast, it was called The Terror of the Zygons, which was just silly, because no one knows who the Zygons are, whereas ‘Loch Ness Monster’ is a pretty recognizable brand name, so it made sense to rename it when they got the chance.

You can tell this was done early in the Fourth Doctor’s career, both by the presence of Harry Sullivan and Sarah Jane Smith as companions (who were holdovers from Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor) and by the fact that, stylistically, it is a Third Doctor style alien invasion of earth story. Otherwise, it’s got a kind of 1950’s paranoid style sci fi feel to it (body snatchers, mists, unstoppable monsters).

I was a big fan of monsters as a kid and I love the Loch Ness Monster (I still sort of believe it exists, mainly because I want to believe) and I’m glad that, even after the Zygon conquest is thwarted, the monster (a Skarasen, which is a sort of giant Zygon milking cow/killing machine) goes back to Loch Ness and lives happily ever after.

Incidentally, I purchased this book with a gift certificate I won as a ten year old after being named co-winner of a costume contest for my awesome dragon costume that my mother made for me (with an awesome tail with a surprisingly complicated system for attaching it while also allowing it ‘play,’ i.e., to swing about in imitation of Godzilla destroying Tokyo).