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.