http://nhw.livejournal.com/1065517.html#cutid1

It's not a big secret that the TV original of this is by far my least favourite Classic Who story. I am none the less utterly amazed by how much worse the novelisation is. Saward attempts to channel Douglas Adams by giving us lots of extra humorous background detail, but it doesn't work for two reasons: less importantly, because he does significant violence to continuity (especially in the back-story for Azmael) without putting anything more interesting in its place; but more crucially because he simply isn't very funny. The strangulated sentence structure and poor proof-reading ("gawdy" for "gaudy", "balk" for "bulk" and at one point "Meersham" for "Meerschaum") further detract from the presentation of what is an unattractive story to begin with. By the law of averages, there must be some turkeys among the various spin-off novels but I would be astonished if any were quite as bad as this. Doctor Who and the Visitation is so much better than this that I had difficulty believing that they were by the same author. ( )