Nesacat
The Cat
Shadows Over Baker Street: Edited by Michael Reaves & John Pelan.
A book where my favourite detective Sherlock Holmes enters the world of HP Lovecraft. That was enough to make me bring the book home.
And the book is good.
I'll admit to being all kinds of wary and was quite prepared to be disappointed but I'm not at all. Here's a tiny tour through the book.
We start with Neil Gaiman's Study In Emerald.
The tale is broken into chapters, each of with begins with a wicked little advert that puts a new spin on old legends such as Dr Henry Jekyll and Victor Frankenstein. In this tale Holmes and Watson meet for the first time in St Bart's and move in together in a London that is unlike the one we think we know. Here the Queen is an Elder God. And a murderer is loose. Someone has killed the Queen's nephew. The walls are splashed with emerald blood and the game is afoot. The moon is crimson and someone wants the old world order back. Someone feels that mankind should hold his destiny in his own hands and that someone is killing Them of. And the murderer is an opponent worthy of Holmes.
Elizabeth Bear's Tiger! Tiger!
This one was not quite so arresting. The tale is set in India and a hunt is one for a tiger that is killing people. The people in the hunt include Irene Adler, only here she is an opera singer. Things are not as they seem. Another member of the hunt Count Kolinzcki seems to have a hold on the lady. There is something he has that she wants. In the background there is the war in Afghanistan and all parties involved are trying to find an edge that will win them the war. They kill a tiger but it's obviously not the creature hunting down the villagers. That is something far removed from the mundane forests of the earth. The creature they are seeking walks in flames and comes to the call of the thing the Count holds. The thing that could just give one party victory in the war.
Steve Perry's The Case Of The Wavy Black Dagger
This tale although well written rang all wrong for me. Holmes never leaves the comfort of 221B Baker Sreet. The problem comes to him in the form of an exotic eastern beauty bearing one of a pair on wavy black daggers. They talk, he rather obviously and uncharacteristically is besotted. he solves the problem and she leaves with him promising to visit. It just didn't seem like him at all.
Steven-Elliot Altman's A Case Of Royal Blood
Here we have a whole new version of a shogoth and grotesque as it is I like it. Holmes is summoned to help the royal family of Holland. They seem to be haunted by a spirit intent on killing the princess. The spirit in question bears an uncanny resemblance to the child and the child herself has some rather odd reading habits. You see, she's found The Book and she's been reading it. And the shoggoth here is a lovely thing indeed born of blood and human flesh and nurtured in the flesh hollow of a strange tree in a strange forest. Not something you'd like to come across on a walk of an evening.
James Lowder's The Weeping Masks
This tale belongs to Watson alone and tells of an incident in Afghanistan that he never told Holmes. He'd been wounded and helped to a village by Murray another doctor in the army. There's an epidemic of some sort in the village and people are dying. The Chief hopes that by offering Watson and Murray shelter, they will find a way to cure his people. As Watson recovers from his wound he sees 'priests' come in the night to visit the sick villages. Priests in robes and masks who weep over the ill. Murray prevents them from doing the same to Watson and the next day the villagers are dead. The same priests come to take the bodies away and Murray is inexplicably missing. Suspecting foul play Watson follows the priests to a cavern with a tunnel that winds down into the dark to open on a chamber that impossibly opens to the sky. There's an altar and men walking who should be dead and in that strange night sky a mammoth being, all boneless limbs and writing darkness.
Brian Stableford's Art In The Blood
And here we have Mycroft and a very frustrated Holmes for he has a problem he cannot fathom. He bring the problem along to the Diogenes Club and we hear a strange tale from an old sailor. Men are being cursed to death and the harbinger of doom is a stone figurine. Part human, part fish with tentacles perhaps. And on the sailor's chest a spreading work of art. An octopus with tentacles asprawl. Here is a tale of things long forgotten but remembered in blood. Things that lie sleeping, waiting to be awakened. Things of the dark and also in others, things that can fight them all down through the ages. Here Sherlock realises that when the impossible is too intractable to be eliminated, one has to revise one's opinion of the limits of the possible.
Poppy Z Brite & David Ferguson's The Curious Case Of Miss Violet Stone
A lady has not eaten or slept for three years and yet lives. Her distraught brother, at his wits end, comes to see Holmes. It is true. The lady does not eat or sleep. Instead she reads the oddest books and makes copious notes. And now she wants The Book. When she sees Holmes this is what she has to say ... You can help me. You have the necessary mental capacities. I have come here by mistake...
Barbara Hambly's The Adventure Of The Antiquarian's Niece
A handsome young man is inexplicably turned away by the family of the woman he loves. He wants to know why. The lady's name? Judith Delapore. You see the way which leads down the six thousand stairs cannot be sealed. It must always have a guardian. That is the nature of such things. And it is always easier to find a venal successor who is willing to trade to Them the things They want in exchange for gifts and services than to find one willing to serve a lonely guardianship solely that the world above may remain safe.
John Pelan's The Mystery Of The Worm
I'd always wondered if Holmes retired to raise bees for a reason other than his fascination with their precise, disciplined society. Here we have one other possible reason and yes, there is a worm. A singularly repulsive worm resembling a centipede. It's head has nasty looking mandibles around what might be a stinger or proboscis. And there is also the possibility of immortality and man who might have walked the Earth as a pharoah in an ancient kingdom. In the end, it might perhaps be true that mankind is not truly ready for immortality.
Paul Finch's The Mystery Of The Hanged Man's Puzzle
I loved this one. There's a huge beast and we get to travel under London town. And of course there's also a fiendish plot to alter the genetic make-up of the citizens of London. I've always been fascinated by the huge network of abandoned tunnels and sewers that run under the great city of London. Imagine all that might be there hidden away from the world above. In a prison, a condemned man gives Holmes a piece of paper with lines and a red spot. Faint lines, thick lines. All moving in a similar direction. The man says it's a puzzle and one that would save the lives of everyone in the great city if solved. And Holmes has oh so very little time. Ah I must not forget to tell you that a great crocodile has gone missing from the zoo and Lestrade is trying and thus far, failing to find it. This tale is a trip through the sewers under London to a lab of a man from across the Atlantic, from a small town on the coast with some very odd people. And now the man is on a quest to spread his cosmic awareness of a brave new dawn.
Tim Lebbon's The Horror Of The Many Faces
I would have bought this book for this tale even if every single other one was not worth reading. This one drives home Lovecraft's assertion that "the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all it's contents." Someone is committing terrible murders in London. People are being cut open. Their organs are being removed and dissected and left in neat rows on the street. Some pieces looking as if they have been chewed upon. And always, the murderer is seen and always there is a sweet familiar smell and taste in the air. Each person who sees the murderer has a different description. Everyone sees someone dear and Watson sees Holmes carving up a man with surgical precision. Is seeing really believing? And what does Holmes have to say? Only this .... I feel belittled ... like a child who has been made aware of everything he will ever learn all at once. We can never know everything but I fear that everything knows us.... Here's a killer who perhaps has no motive. Perhaps it was just curious. After all it came from outside .... the whole different place beyond what we know or strive to know. And now he's seen it ... but does not understand.
Michael Reaves' The Adventure Of The Arab's Manuscript
A lady from Watson's past come to him from Afghanistan seeking Sherlock's help to find the missing original manuscript of the Necronomicon. And Holmes find himself trying to save the world from infestation by an enemy from outside.
Caitlin R Kiernan's The Drowned Geologist
I like this one too. Holmes makes a rather odd appearance and suits him all the more for its oddness.
John P Vourlis' A Case Of Insomnia
Holmes could not sleep. While that may not be unusual, there is also a town and it's inhabitants too cannot sleep for fear of a thing that comes in the dark. They stay awake and always keep a light burning for the things comes not only in the physical darkness of rooms and streets but also in the darkness that sleep brings.
Richard A Lupoff's The Adventure Of The Voorish Sign
Two homes and both have a locked room. Inside the room walls meet at impossible angles and darkness spills through the spaces between. There are no windows, no furniture and yet one man is missing and another might soon follow.
F Gwnplaine Macintyre's The Adventure Of Exham Priory
What happened when Holmes went over the Reichenbach Falls? Perhaps he was taken to a hidden cavern where his nemesis Moriarty had made a promise. And perhaps that promise was broken allowing Holmes to return. And perhaps it is true that things go in a cycle and now the time has come for Holmes to face again the maker of that promise in aid of a young man who's psychical appearance is fast altering to one more suited for the water than the land. And perhaps there are some things the loss of which nothing can ever make up for. Not even all the riches of the universe, whatever the nature of those riches might be.
David Niall Wilson & Patricia Lee Macomber's Death Did Not Become Him
In the depths of a cold night Holmes has a visitor. Someone is frightened and worried and needs help. After years of helping to solve the problems of others, it is Watson who needs help this time. A man who is dead is walking again and Watson does not know what to do. I like this tale for it's roots in old legend and myth and half forgotten whispers. I like it for the lengths to which some will go to get what they want and I like it for the words that were said in the end. They fit here and they did then all those centuries ago.
Simon Clark's Nightmare in Wax
Holmes is really not in this tale though we here his voice and the voice of Moriarty. You see this time, Moriarty has The Book. A fitting way to end this collection of tales for it leaves the door of possibilities open and ends as the book began ... with the game once again afoot.
A book where my favourite detective Sherlock Holmes enters the world of HP Lovecraft. That was enough to make me bring the book home.
And the book is good.
I'll admit to being all kinds of wary and was quite prepared to be disappointed but I'm not at all. Here's a tiny tour through the book.We start with Neil Gaiman's Study In Emerald.
The tale is broken into chapters, each of with begins with a wicked little advert that puts a new spin on old legends such as Dr Henry Jekyll and Victor Frankenstein. In this tale Holmes and Watson meet for the first time in St Bart's and move in together in a London that is unlike the one we think we know. Here the Queen is an Elder God. And a murderer is loose. Someone has killed the Queen's nephew. The walls are splashed with emerald blood and the game is afoot. The moon is crimson and someone wants the old world order back. Someone feels that mankind should hold his destiny in his own hands and that someone is killing Them of. And the murderer is an opponent worthy of Holmes.
Elizabeth Bear's Tiger! Tiger!
This one was not quite so arresting. The tale is set in India and a hunt is one for a tiger that is killing people. The people in the hunt include Irene Adler, only here she is an opera singer. Things are not as they seem. Another member of the hunt Count Kolinzcki seems to have a hold on the lady. There is something he has that she wants. In the background there is the war in Afghanistan and all parties involved are trying to find an edge that will win them the war. They kill a tiger but it's obviously not the creature hunting down the villagers. That is something far removed from the mundane forests of the earth. The creature they are seeking walks in flames and comes to the call of the thing the Count holds. The thing that could just give one party victory in the war.
Steve Perry's The Case Of The Wavy Black Dagger
This tale although well written rang all wrong for me. Holmes never leaves the comfort of 221B Baker Sreet. The problem comes to him in the form of an exotic eastern beauty bearing one of a pair on wavy black daggers. They talk, he rather obviously and uncharacteristically is besotted. he solves the problem and she leaves with him promising to visit. It just didn't seem like him at all.
Steven-Elliot Altman's A Case Of Royal Blood
Here we have a whole new version of a shogoth and grotesque as it is I like it. Holmes is summoned to help the royal family of Holland. They seem to be haunted by a spirit intent on killing the princess. The spirit in question bears an uncanny resemblance to the child and the child herself has some rather odd reading habits. You see, she's found The Book and she's been reading it. And the shoggoth here is a lovely thing indeed born of blood and human flesh and nurtured in the flesh hollow of a strange tree in a strange forest. Not something you'd like to come across on a walk of an evening.
James Lowder's The Weeping Masks
This tale belongs to Watson alone and tells of an incident in Afghanistan that he never told Holmes. He'd been wounded and helped to a village by Murray another doctor in the army. There's an epidemic of some sort in the village and people are dying. The Chief hopes that by offering Watson and Murray shelter, they will find a way to cure his people. As Watson recovers from his wound he sees 'priests' come in the night to visit the sick villages. Priests in robes and masks who weep over the ill. Murray prevents them from doing the same to Watson and the next day the villagers are dead. The same priests come to take the bodies away and Murray is inexplicably missing. Suspecting foul play Watson follows the priests to a cavern with a tunnel that winds down into the dark to open on a chamber that impossibly opens to the sky. There's an altar and men walking who should be dead and in that strange night sky a mammoth being, all boneless limbs and writing darkness.
Brian Stableford's Art In The Blood
And here we have Mycroft and a very frustrated Holmes for he has a problem he cannot fathom. He bring the problem along to the Diogenes Club and we hear a strange tale from an old sailor. Men are being cursed to death and the harbinger of doom is a stone figurine. Part human, part fish with tentacles perhaps. And on the sailor's chest a spreading work of art. An octopus with tentacles asprawl. Here is a tale of things long forgotten but remembered in blood. Things that lie sleeping, waiting to be awakened. Things of the dark and also in others, things that can fight them all down through the ages. Here Sherlock realises that when the impossible is too intractable to be eliminated, one has to revise one's opinion of the limits of the possible.
Poppy Z Brite & David Ferguson's The Curious Case Of Miss Violet Stone
A lady has not eaten or slept for three years and yet lives. Her distraught brother, at his wits end, comes to see Holmes. It is true. The lady does not eat or sleep. Instead she reads the oddest books and makes copious notes. And now she wants The Book. When she sees Holmes this is what she has to say ... You can help me. You have the necessary mental capacities. I have come here by mistake...
Barbara Hambly's The Adventure Of The Antiquarian's Niece
A handsome young man is inexplicably turned away by the family of the woman he loves. He wants to know why. The lady's name? Judith Delapore. You see the way which leads down the six thousand stairs cannot be sealed. It must always have a guardian. That is the nature of such things. And it is always easier to find a venal successor who is willing to trade to Them the things They want in exchange for gifts and services than to find one willing to serve a lonely guardianship solely that the world above may remain safe.
John Pelan's The Mystery Of The Worm
I'd always wondered if Holmes retired to raise bees for a reason other than his fascination with their precise, disciplined society. Here we have one other possible reason and yes, there is a worm. A singularly repulsive worm resembling a centipede. It's head has nasty looking mandibles around what might be a stinger or proboscis. And there is also the possibility of immortality and man who might have walked the Earth as a pharoah in an ancient kingdom. In the end, it might perhaps be true that mankind is not truly ready for immortality.
Paul Finch's The Mystery Of The Hanged Man's Puzzle
I loved this one. There's a huge beast and we get to travel under London town. And of course there's also a fiendish plot to alter the genetic make-up of the citizens of London. I've always been fascinated by the huge network of abandoned tunnels and sewers that run under the great city of London. Imagine all that might be there hidden away from the world above. In a prison, a condemned man gives Holmes a piece of paper with lines and a red spot. Faint lines, thick lines. All moving in a similar direction. The man says it's a puzzle and one that would save the lives of everyone in the great city if solved. And Holmes has oh so very little time. Ah I must not forget to tell you that a great crocodile has gone missing from the zoo and Lestrade is trying and thus far, failing to find it. This tale is a trip through the sewers under London to a lab of a man from across the Atlantic, from a small town on the coast with some very odd people. And now the man is on a quest to spread his cosmic awareness of a brave new dawn.
Tim Lebbon's The Horror Of The Many Faces
I would have bought this book for this tale even if every single other one was not worth reading. This one drives home Lovecraft's assertion that "the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all it's contents." Someone is committing terrible murders in London. People are being cut open. Their organs are being removed and dissected and left in neat rows on the street. Some pieces looking as if they have been chewed upon. And always, the murderer is seen and always there is a sweet familiar smell and taste in the air. Each person who sees the murderer has a different description. Everyone sees someone dear and Watson sees Holmes carving up a man with surgical precision. Is seeing really believing? And what does Holmes have to say? Only this .... I feel belittled ... like a child who has been made aware of everything he will ever learn all at once. We can never know everything but I fear that everything knows us.... Here's a killer who perhaps has no motive. Perhaps it was just curious. After all it came from outside .... the whole different place beyond what we know or strive to know. And now he's seen it ... but does not understand.
Michael Reaves' The Adventure Of The Arab's Manuscript
A lady from Watson's past come to him from Afghanistan seeking Sherlock's help to find the missing original manuscript of the Necronomicon. And Holmes find himself trying to save the world from infestation by an enemy from outside.
Caitlin R Kiernan's The Drowned Geologist
I like this one too. Holmes makes a rather odd appearance and suits him all the more for its oddness.
John P Vourlis' A Case Of Insomnia
Holmes could not sleep. While that may not be unusual, there is also a town and it's inhabitants too cannot sleep for fear of a thing that comes in the dark. They stay awake and always keep a light burning for the things comes not only in the physical darkness of rooms and streets but also in the darkness that sleep brings.
Richard A Lupoff's The Adventure Of The Voorish Sign
Two homes and both have a locked room. Inside the room walls meet at impossible angles and darkness spills through the spaces between. There are no windows, no furniture and yet one man is missing and another might soon follow.
F Gwnplaine Macintyre's The Adventure Of Exham Priory
What happened when Holmes went over the Reichenbach Falls? Perhaps he was taken to a hidden cavern where his nemesis Moriarty had made a promise. And perhaps that promise was broken allowing Holmes to return. And perhaps it is true that things go in a cycle and now the time has come for Holmes to face again the maker of that promise in aid of a young man who's psychical appearance is fast altering to one more suited for the water than the land. And perhaps there are some things the loss of which nothing can ever make up for. Not even all the riches of the universe, whatever the nature of those riches might be.
David Niall Wilson & Patricia Lee Macomber's Death Did Not Become Him
In the depths of a cold night Holmes has a visitor. Someone is frightened and worried and needs help. After years of helping to solve the problems of others, it is Watson who needs help this time. A man who is dead is walking again and Watson does not know what to do. I like this tale for it's roots in old legend and myth and half forgotten whispers. I like it for the lengths to which some will go to get what they want and I like it for the words that were said in the end. They fit here and they did then all those centuries ago.
Simon Clark's Nightmare in Wax
Holmes is really not in this tale though we here his voice and the voice of Moriarty. You see this time, Moriarty has The Book. A fitting way to end this collection of tales for it leaves the door of possibilities open and ends as the book began ... with the game once again afoot.
