My Grave Ritual

May 28, 2018
Denning blends laughs and chills in his entertaining third warped take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s oeuvre (after 2017’s The Hell-Hound of the Baskervilles), in which Sherlock Holmes is a sorcerer and Watson is his more astute companion. Sherlockians will be especially appreciative of some of the jokes that riff on the canon, such as Denning’s version of the King of Bohemia advising Warlock Holmes that he should “not take it amiss if your visitor wears a mask and tries to kill you.” The volume consists of eight stories that take major detours from the originals that inspired them. For example, in “The Adventure of the Blue Gob-Runkle,” a cooked Christmas goose returns to life and goes on the attack; in “The Adventure of the Copper’s Screeches,” governess Violet Hunter wears a dress that is literally electric blue. The story lines of the parodies are secondary to the humor—in the best entry, the title story, Reginald Musgrave explains that male Musgraves must be named either Reginald or Spotsgrave. While Denning has been funnier in the previous books, his series conceit is broad enough to sustain this installment.