Reviews
Reviewing the novel in his Shelf Life column in Doctor Who Magazine, the magazine's resident book critic Dave Owen was extremely positive about Damaged Goods. "Author Russell T Davies is a welcome new addition to Doctor Who fiction, bringing a lucid, matter-of-fact style of storytelling that has more in common with Stephen Gallagher's modern horror novels than Irvine Welsh's stylised fables... Purists might argue that a book full of sex, drugs and squalor can't really be Doctor Who, but they would be forgetting that the essence of the series and those like it is in portraying ordinary people's reactions to the unprecedented. It's done so brilliantly here that, much as I abhor scores, rankings and superlatives, I'll admit that Damaged Goods is currently my favourite New Adventure."
However, not all readers agreed with Owen's assessment that the setting and themes of Damaged Goods were one of its strengths. "Call me an escapist if you want," Matthew Mitchell wrote in a review for the Outpost Gallifrey fan website, "but if I want a dose of the Problems of the World and Man's inhumanity to man, I'll pick up the newspaper. I don't buy science fiction, especially not Doctor Who, for a lesson in modern sociology. I certainly would not have bought Damaged Goods had I known that is precisely what I would be getting."
Generally, however, reaction to the novel was extremely positive, with other online reviews around the time of the book's release praising Davies's work. "In Damaged Goods, Russell Davies has marked himself as the best newcomer to Doctor Who fiction since Lance Parkin eight months earlier," wrote Shannon Patrick Sullivan on his own website. "Davies has crafted a taut, compelling novel which falls down only slightly at the end. Certainly, Damaged Goods is one of the best novels Virgin has released in 1996... Damaged Goods is a template for Doctor Who in the Nineties; I hope Davies has the opportunity at a follow-up under the aegis of the BBC."
Sullivan's website also includes a monthly updated list of the most popular Doctor Who novels, "The Doctor Who Novel Rankings", based on votes e-mailed in by readers and running since 1993. As of the January 4, 2006 edition of the novel rankings, Damaged Goods was placed eighth in the list of most popular New Adventures novels. In 1998, Doctor Who Magazine ran their own one-off readers' poll to find the most popular New Adventures as part of their celebrations of Doctor Who's 35th anniversary. Damaged Goods received votes from 780 readers, with an average score of 7.295 out of 10, placing it thirteenth out of the sixty-one novels in the series.
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