This week we’re starting off the Storybook 2007! We’re reading Cuckoo-Spit by Mark Gatiss.
Please discuss below - no need to finish it first, discuss as you go along but please add spoiler tags for anything that could be considered a spoiler!
If you’ve previously read the book and want to join in the discussion, that’s great too!
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This was the first story I logged on TARDIS Guide for 2026… For some reason, haha
I struggle to remember much about it, save for the illustration of the Tenth Doctor having some weird proportions that really accentuated his lanky frame. Looking back, I seem to have rated it a 5/10, which is unsurprising for an average Doctor Who storybook entry…
It’s an interesting enough story, and a format that I enjoy. I liked that it was all told from Jason’s point of view with his understanding. So we see how the Doctor and Rose handle the case from his perspective. Not really sure what the antagonists were but I thought it was pretty solid for a short story.
I read this not very long ago and clearly I quite liked it, as I gave it 3.5 stars. Details slip from my memory so I can’t recall the story, but I do know I thought it was a good one, FWIW.
I hadn’t realized I had read this before. Presumably this collection was a Christmas gift one year (I never bought the annuals or storybooks myself).
It’s a simple plot but this is about the feelings of being caught up in one of the Doctor’s adventures.
I enjoyed how this gives its seventies setting. From the TV references to the sort of general sense of an analog childhood. The child’s voice comes over authentically through the narration without ever striking me as too contrived.
I enjoyed this more than I wanted to (I’m sure you’re all familiar with my thoughts on Gatiss’ writing by now). I thought he wrote the child’s diary format very convincingly, and it was fun to read. It certainly felt like he was very much writing his own childhood experiences - and maybe what he’d imagined at that age in terms of an encounter with the Doctor. That’s not the subtlest but I suppose most readers wouldn’t know the name so wouldn’t put those two and two together. Speaking of the readers though, I was surprised by just how dark and creepy this was - I have never so much as opened any of the storybooks, despite owning them all, and I had fully assumed, I suppose from the design and the name, that these would be twee stories aimed at a very young audience. So I was very pleasantly surprised by just how mature this story was, even if it was a little cookie-cutter in places. I also really liked the style of the illustrations.