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After a pretty average
start to the Unseen trilogy, Door To Alternity should have
seen Holder and Mariotte pulling things together, ready for the conclusion
to the series.
Instead, we get a pretty
tedious 300 pages that struggles to maintain the reader's interest.
Pocket Books have promised
us a Buffy/Angel crossover, but so far they haven't
delivered. Buffy and Angel meet up, then each decides to look after
events on their own patch. Gunn, who seems to be a bit of an
afterthought, turns up in Sunnydale and then decides to return home!
No-one expected the characters to join forces from the outset, but having
them meet and then part immediately afterwards isn't really playing far, and
it doesn't help the structure of the book much either.
The Burning had an
awful lot of plot strands, and the authors keep all the balls in the air
here, as well as introducing even more. The result is a novel that
flits from one location to another, one story line to another and one
character to another, all padded out by lengthy, and increasingly tedious,
fight scenes. There's also an awful lot of violence, as if the authors
believe that this somehow makes the book more "adult".
The "door to alternity"
provided by the renegade Russian scientists seems like little more than a
telepathically controlled version of Quinn Mallory's invention from Sliders.
It might have been better to have revealed this in a single huge chunk
rather than through various flashbacks throughout the novel, so as to keep a
sense of mystery for a little longer.
However, even that wouldn't
have made up for the lack of decent characterisation here. I didn't
find myself particularly interested in any of the novel's original
characters, and the ones from the television series aren't particularly well
served either. And while some of the Doctor Who novels and
audios have been able to flesh out even the most two-dimensional characters
and to build on what we saw on screen, there's none of that here.
In fact, many of the
regulars are rather poorly depicted. Anya does little more than talk
about sex while Xander puns lamely. The "Buffy-speak"
element of the show might well be one of the elements that quick date, but
Holder and Mariotte haven't subtly moved the dialogue on while remaining
true to the characters - Cordelia seems stuck with her "morbid
much?" speak and Willow is even more annoying.
In addition, the chance to
set the Buffy-Riley relationship in a more convincing context is blown
completely as the authors give it a far greater emotional depth than Gellar
and Blucas gave it on screen. It simply doesn't ring true.
The opening installment of
this trilogy promised a lot, but this second chunk doesn't really deliver. Perhaps the conclusion will manage to make it a worthwhile
exercise, but at this stage I wouldn't put money on it.
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