So. Dead Romance. Okay, so this is a book that was originally published for an entirely different Doctor Who book series, which didn't feature the main character of that series in any capacity, and which was later republished as part of the Faction Paradox line. Cool. Let's see what we've got here.
Obligatory plot summary: it's a book set in the '70s, about a drug addict named Christine Summerfield who crosses paths with a brainwashed agent of the Great Houses and former 7th Doctor companion, Chris Cwej. As the book goes on, we learn all sorts of wild revelations. Christine actually lives in a bottle universe, which Cwej has come to to set up a "survival team" since the Great Houses are fighting some Gods, there's also eldritch horrors / computers called Sphinxes, then there's evil people from the time vortex, and Christine defeats them by playing rock-paper-scissors, and then it turns out she was supposed to be a sacrifice victim but Cwej got attached, and actually the Great Houses invade the bottle-Earth and everyone dies. Also Gallifrey is in ruins and that's seemingly irrelevant to any other Doctor Who or Faction Paradox lore???
Well, it's kind of a lot. That much is obvious.
Is it good, though? Well, I mean, it's Lawrence Miles – it's good in worldbuilding and in prose style if nothing else. It's chock-full of creative ideas, with some wonderful worldbuilding that's written to make the scope feel absolutely vast. The descriptions of the alien planets, the Great Houses' warships, all the monsters and creatures, really send you into this world so different from our own. Oh, and Cwej! Chris Cwej is an all-time great character, and perhaps the most compelling part of the whole thing for me. This is my first real exposure to him, and seeing him as a tragic figure who's been brainwashed but is still trying to do the right thing... there's so many little quirks and comments Christine makes a note out of in the narration that just crush you. He's not a good person, his flaws are wildly evident, and that's why the sympathetic aspects of his personality land. Or at least make him fascinating to look at from a distance.
And as for the main character, the one narrating this whole thing? The framing mechanism of the book being Christine's journal is solid in a vacuum, and the narration style really sucks you in. Christine's snarky but thoughtful, and she has a lot to say. There's barely a dull moment, because even when the plot's in downtime, Christine finds unique things to talk about, aspects of her life and ways of describing things. It does keep you hooked, and I felt like her personal style of narration sucked me into the world that much more, with the little details and comparisons she picks out about everything around her. The thing is just... I felt like I'd seen all this before, with This Town Will Never Let Us Go. It gives the impression a little bit that once you've read one Lawrence Miles book, you've read them all. Like, it was solid, and sure, it had some different themes to This Town, but I didn't feel like I was getting that much new from it. A lot of the jumpy, rambly, splintered prose style is much the same.
This is also very much an issue of it being republished as a Faction Paradox book, I'm aware. In the context of Virgin's Bernice Summerfield series, I'm sure this was groundbreaking stuff in how its style, premise, and worldbuilding stood out from the rest – and I'm sure there's interest in it ties into Bernice Summerfield lore. But being exposed to it after reading a bunch of other Faction Paradox content, it just feels a bit unrefined compared to a lot of the stuff I've read that postdates it, especially Miles's own later work.
The ideas come fast and hard, and they're painted with one hell of an evocative brush (loved the initial description of the Sphinx), but the scattered stream-of-consciousness style means that the story, the one that's meant to frame those ideas, doesn't land as well as it should. The journal-y writing style makes the reader connect to Christine more, at the cost of the story's coherency. It feels more like a series of vignettes than a proper adventure, like... well, like pretty much any other Faction book. Lawrence Miles's scattered, vignettish writing style works a lot better in a book that's more theme-focused, where the worldbuilding is more subtle, spread out, and contained, like This Town Will Never Let Us Go manages. To really get these wild ideas across and make the story they're in compelling, you either need a full story to frame them (see most Faction books), or go whole hog with the idea dump and not give the impression of a plot in the first place (see The Book of the War).
Dead Romance works. It's a good book, with compelling narration, and some great plot twists at the end. There's some themes in there as well, about oppression and mass media and storytelling, that land really well and give the reader something to chew on. Oh, and Chris Cwej is an all-time great character, for this book alone. But is it really Miles's best, as so often claimed? No, not when you compare it to something like A Labyrinth of Histories or This Town. I would probably enjoy this more if I was reading the Bernice Summerfield Virgin books, but framing it as a Faction book lets it down a bit, solid as it is. In the end, there's plenty of bits that are memorable enough, but if I had to pick a Miles book for my brain to chew on, I would pick This Town Will Never Let Us Go in a heartbeat.
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