We may have just seen the Ncuti Gatwa take his final bow out of the TARDIS, but the Fifteenth Doctor lives on in brand new books. Today I’m looking at Shirley Jackson and the Chaos Box by Kalynn Bayron, this month’s release in the Doctor Who: Icons series published by Penguin Books.
The Icons series sees a different Doctor zipping off on an adventure with a significant historical figure: Frida Kalo meeting the Thirteenth Doctor is a perfect match, while the Tenth Doctor meets Charles Darwin in a story that’s bound to ruffle some Big Finish purists. Though I haven’t been able to read either of those yet, I was delighted to find Shirley Jackson and the Chaos Box landing on my doorstep as my first chance to dig into this range.
This one goes out to the writers, specifically American horror and mystery author Shirley Jackson. The Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby Sunday, early in their travels, visit the Shirley Jackson Literary Museum only to come across an angry mob whipped into a frenzy by a strange box. Seeing life imitate art, the Doctor decides to track down Shirley Jackson herself and finds an alien conspiracy almost a century in the making.
I’m too squeamish for horror so unfortunately I’m not particularly familiar with Jackson’s work, but luckily Chaos Box does a fantastic job of filling the reader in, even turning the Doctor’s constant and vocal adoration of Jackson’s work into a crucial part of the plot. So, if you’re like me, you won’t feel out of the loop.
Kalynn Bayron
Kalynn Bayron is a highly successful YA fantasy author, known for her 2020 novel Cinderella is Dead and The Vanquishers series. She’s no stranger to writing for Doctor Who either, having contributed a Ninth Doctor story – The Monster in the Cupboard – to the Decades series in 2023. Her experience writing fantasy, a genre typified by plenty of descriptive detail, shows up in her writing here, as the prose works hard to give the reader as much sensory information as humanly possible.
However, there are times when this works against the story, especially when tense, high-energy moments slam to a halt in order to (almost literally) smell the roses. Even as characters flee imminent death, the narration insists on sentences overflowing with adjectives. It’s not always a bad thing and there are times the lengthy description helps build tension, but in some cases they could have been trimmed more judiciously. The descriptions are beautiful so I understand why it must have been hard to lose them, but it rather hurts the pacing.
Do Call Her Shirley
Clocking in at an efficient 84 pages, Bayron crafts a fantastic plot that grants the reader a clear insight into the mind of Shirley Jackson. That said, I wish she’d been more instrumental to the plot and didn’t get sidelined into a bit of a companion role in the middle. In fact, I’d love to see a version of the story more focused on Shirley, with the Doctor and Ruby dropping into her life, so we could spend more time following her life and her insecurities before the plot kicks in. Even though the plot is somewhat reminiscent of Jackson’s work, I was relieved to see the story gave Jackson’s literary imagination its full due and didn’t give in to the temptation to make her greatest work actually be a retelling of her alien encounter.
Overall
Though I wish these things could be longer, I understand that these books are aimed at a younger audience than some of the more traditional Doctor Who literary output. Just shy of a hundred pages (my edition also included the first three chapters of The Silurian Survival) is the perfect length to feel accessible to a younger reader, and that includes keeping the familiar heroes in the forefront is an easier. I hope Bayron gets the opportunity to write more about Shirley Jackson someday because her admiration for the writer is woven into the story.
Doctor Who Icons: Shirley Jackson and the Chaos Box is available to buy now.