To begin with (after a great opening chapter) it's all peaceful English countryside, with the Doctor and his friends amusingly branded as "gypsies" by the local busybody... So far, so quaint. As the local wasps start behaving oddly however, so does the plot. We've got a rather spuriously explained set of Future Time Detectives, sent to clean up a potentially disastrous situation by whatever means necessary. (It's almost as if Mr Baxendale had been reading the Cool Kids of Time series...) We've got little nods towards family secrets and local intrigue. Certain plot elements seem unimaginative - why introduce a nuclear bomb to a pre nuclear Britain setting unless you're going to do something with the anachronism? It smacked a little of "Insert big threat here".

All in all, we've got a bit of a mish mash that manages to work rather well, somehow. I don't know quite why I enjoyed this book, but I did. The Doctor behaves rather callously from time to time, a developing but underplayed theme in the revamped series since The Burning. Fitz comes across as a fairly confident young man, showing signs at last of the sort of effortless adapting to circumstance that every other companion has managed after two adventures. Anji shines - she shows again her individuality, and although she falls into the rescued companion category later on, it's never for reasons other than her own choices.

The flesh-crawling cover and rather literal title both prepare one well for the later tone of this book - what fans of director David Cronenberg call "body-horror". And indeed the themes of insects taking over people does seem to owe more to The Fly than anything else, but this gory thriller taps neatly into the same vein of horror of the Wirrn, the grubs in The Green Death and many Who monsters over the years. It's a romp this book, but a worthy one, with some interesting nods towards future themes for the eighth Doctor.