“ ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’ ” “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulu waits dreaming.” A collection of short stories written by some of the top names in speculative fiction, Shadows Over Baker Street takes the intractable Sherlock Holmes and gives him the macabre world of equally unconquerable writer H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft is an early twentieth century author whose stories about the Cthulu mythos (a human-destroying monster from the deep) and the Necronomicon (an ancient book of forbidden rites and spells) seem expressly written to combine the words weird and horror. Lovecraft’s mythos have been firmly believed in, written about, and expanded upon as often and as devotedly as any of the Sherlock Holmes reinventions. Given Arthur Conan Doyle’s own preoccupations with the supernatural, these giants of literature meet and meld perfectly. Who better than Sherlock, tenacious and unwavering, to solve the mysteries of Lovecraft’s small-town mutants, ancient aliens, and dream monsters? The writers of this new batch of short stories--who include Poppy Z. Brite and Neil Gaiman---are clearly having an absolute ball bringing these two mythologies together. One mystical story features Sherlock’s female rival, tenacious Irene Adler, as an African hunter who confronts a horrifying something in the jungle. Another allows Holmes to match wits with an almost equal intellect when he encounters extraterrestrial life. Several writers make use of Lovecraft’s tribe of freakishly aquatic villagers in the haunted town of Innsmouth; another has Holmes stumble across a rare copy of the Necronomicon in an Afghanistan cave. This clever blending of classics, spooky and hilarious, makes for a unique read that will thrill both horror and mystery fans alike, and will really give die-hard Sherlockians some new and unusual crimes to take a bite out of.

posted Feb 5, 2010 at 12:17AM

 Add a Comment