A collection of six stories about Doctor Who's arch-villain, the Master. Each one features a different incarnation, including the often-neglected post-Roger Delgado version, when he was all gross and crispy and mostly dead. More precisely, there are five shorter pieces and one that I think is (or at least closely approaches) novella length. The shorter ones were all readable enough, and generally they each featured at least one reasonably interesting idea: the answer to the question of where the Master gets all his amazingly lifelike masks, for instance, or a plot in which the aforementioned undead-ish version partly inspired the novel Dracula. But I can't say any of them stood out, particularly. The longer piece, on the other hand -- "The Master and Margarita" by Matthew Sweet -- was just weird. Even by Doctor Who standards. There's, like, a capitalist mushroom, and the Master appears to be dating a Silurian, and... I don't even know, honestly. I also don't know whether it's ultimately good-weird or bad-weird, but it was certainly interesting, and in its own way entertaining. (I do imagine it's parodying the novel of the same name to some extent, but I couldn't really say. That one's been sitting on my TBR shelves for years, but I still haven't gotten around to reading it, so all I can do is judge the story on its own trippy merits... if I could quite figure out how!) ( )

Anger Management - 2/5
The Dead Travel Fast - 3/5
Missy’s Magical Mystery Mission - 5/5
A Master In Disguise - 5/5
The Night Harvest - 5/5
The Master and the Margarita - 2/5 ( )

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/i-am-the-master-by-peter-anghelides-et-al/

Six short stories about different incarnations of the Master, by Peter Anghelides (Delgado!Master), Mark Wright (Pratt/Beevors!Master), Jac Rayner (Missy), Mike Tucker (Ainley!Master), Beverley Sanford (Simm!Master) and Matthew Sweet (Dhawan!Master). I thought they were all pretty good; I expect that Matthew Sweet’s Soviet-era riff on a well-known novel, “The Master and Margarita”, will sail over some people’s heads but I enjoyed it too. Recommended. ( )