Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities

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.