The Cthulhu Casebooks

December 5, 2016
British author Lovegrove (Sherlock Holmes: The Thinking Engine) attempts a thorough revision of the canon in this trilogy kickoff, but fails to effectively blend the world of the uber-rational Holmes with that of Lovecraft’s cosmic horrors. In a prologue, Watson admits that in his previously recounted stories he has constructed “a shell of artifice around a dark, rotten kernel so as to protect civilisation from certain facts that would throw its cosy self-assurance into drastic and lasting disarray.” He begins with an altered account of his first meeting with Holmes; the pair actually met in 1880 in a seedy back alley London pub when Watson’s well-intentioned intervention in a violent confrontation involving an old colleague, Dr. Valentine Stamford, disrupted a disguised Holmes’s surveillance of the man. Holmes suspects Stamford of being behind a series of gruesome murders that have left the victims’ corpses desiccated. After Holmes has a terrifying supernatural encounter, Watson reveals the true circumstances of how he was wounded in Afghanistan, and the pair team up. Action, rather than ratiocination, dominates, and the writing is uneven.

December 18, 2017
Tone problems mar Lovegrove’s sequel to 2016’s The Cthulhu Casebooks: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows, an ambitious attempt to graft H.P. Lovecraft’s supernatural cosmic horror onto Sherlock Holmes’s hyper-rational Victorian world. In this fictional universe, Dr. Watson has bowdlerized his friend’s actual investigations for publication to conceal that they involved encounters with demonic foes. For example, Watson’s first wife, Mary Morstan, was torn to pieces by a “hulking thing with webbed feet and membranous wings,” and the Baker Street Irregulars are a band of formerly cannibalistic snake men whom Holmes freed from being trapped underground. The plot—the search for Zacariah Conroy, a student at Miskatonic University who supposedly inserted the consciousness of a bird into a monkey—suffers from tameness, and Holmes’s light mood as they narrow in on Conroy doesn’t mesh well with the fearsome background. Other authors have done a better job of pitting Conan Doyle’s detective against Lovecraftian horrors.