Morris dancers are evil - but you already knew that...

Doctor Who is fondly remembered as comedy horror for kids. During its pop cultural peak of the mid-1970s, the show's makers regularly received complaints that the show was too disturbing for the youthful audience at which it was aimed. Well, heaven only knows what Mary Whitehouse would have made of the vividness of Rags.

Possibly more than any other novel in the range, Rags does not need to be a Doctor Who story; the Doctor, Jo and the men from UNIT are absent for lengthy stretches of the story, and even when present they are frequently under malign influence and therefore acting somewhat out of character. I'm undecided as to whether this is a good or bad thing; after all, there are enough books coming out each year to allow for such flexibility of style, and there's certainly no need for every new Third Doctor adventure to be such a joyful facsimile of the era as, say, Last of the Gaderene. However, when it's the sections without those characters that we already know and love that stand out as the most thrilling and enjoyable, perhaps the two strands of fiction being merged herein haven't been integrated quite as successfully as they should.

Which is a shame, because otherwise this story of possession, mass hysteria - illustrated with unprecedented graphic violence and gore - is actually quite absorbing and presented with no little style. The isolated rural setting of the moors of south-west England is an ideal and previously underused setting for this type of scare-story, and the duality of the "mummers" - pagan folk idols - evokes the familiar convention of "scary clowns" nicely.

Perhaps if Lewis writes another novel for the range - and I'd like to see him try a sixth Doctor adventure - he'll be able to overcome this irksome lack of cohesion. Rags is entertaining enough, but ultimately it's not really challenging or expanding the Doctor Who format as much as it thinks it is, because it never really feels like Doctor Who at all...