Customer Reviews

Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror!

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I can half heartedly reccomend this with serious caveats.

Problem one. It is really a one-trick pony. OK. You get it. Holmes vs. various mythos creatures. This looks great on paper but does not sustain a book. If you are really interested, however, and since many of the stories are entertaining and a couple actually thought provoking, then buy it and read no more than one story a month, maybe every 6 weeks. This isn't only because of the limitations of the idea, but also because all but two authors chose (generally successfully) to mimic Doyle's/"Watson's" writing style.

Problem two. A disproportionate number of stories are based on The Shadow over Innsmouth. One that isn't, "The Curious Case of Miss Violet Stone," is, as has been pointed out by a previous review, based on The Shadow out of Time. This is one of the two best stories in the book. A few stories seem headed off down that sidetrack created by August Derleth where there was a chance in fighting back and winning with Help from Outside. In HPL doom was eventually inevitable and there was no Help available.

"Death Did Not Become Him" is very tenuously mythos being more related to the story of the Golem and Cabbalistic mysticism with a pretty lane excuse given for the connection.

Most of The Uspeakable Old Ones are named in various chants and so forth, but few put in an appearance. In the original HPL the power of suggestion hightened the suspense. Here it is merely disappointing. Shub-Niggurath has a cameo and I think (based on precious little evidence) that Nyarlathotep has some off-stage schtick. Most disappointing, Chthlhu Himself is totally AWOL, replaced by innumerable aquatic hybrids.

"The Case of the Antiquaritan's Niece," is vaguely related to "The Dunwich Horror."

The best story is by Neil Gaiman. More or less connected to At the Mountains of Madness, it also reminded me of the wonderful Kim Newman's Anno Dracula books.

Many fans of the literature of H.P. Lovecraft wonder what his fiction would have been like if set in another era. Ramsey Campbell is perhaps the best representative of the '60s and '70s while John Tynes and his crew admirably adapt the core of Cthulhu to the 1990's. But what about the 1890's? Well, there is already a game afoot in that period and it is the inestimable Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion and recorder Dr. John Watson. The 1890's of Sherlock Holmes brings to the table of the Lovecraftian corpus the very summit of the Enlightenment and Rationality to be broken on the jagged rocks of Madness and Otherworldliness. Before the humbling of the Great War, all the power and prestige of the West was to be found in London, as well as the darkness of poverty, suffering, and a bubbling social revolution, ripe to be exploited for the Mythos.

Some of the stories herein are mere supernatural detective tales. The Sherlock Holmes we know and love has never been beaten and can conquer even the eldritch and the horrific when armed with the Necronomicon. Here, the gnosticism of Abdul Al-Hazred is simply one more tool in the box of Holmes for fighting the forces of darkness. Rarer is the story where he must come to grips with something he can't explain, when his much vaunted intellect is vanquished by something too alien to be dealt with by mere humans. In a world of only rational numbers, the value of "pi" is insanity. I think only "The Horror of the many Faces" successfully pulls this off.

Not every one of these tales is about Sherlock Holmes. A few deal more or less exclusively with Dr. Watson, and one is even about Irene Adler. H.G. Wells makes a guest appearance, and "A Study in Emerald" has . . . well, the ending is too good to give any hints.

For anyone who enjoys both Lovecraft and Doyle, this is a great anthology. I think that the tone leans more towards the latter than the former, but it is better than much of the fiction published recently, and is perhaps as good as the anthology SHADOWS OVER INNSMOUTH edited by Stephen Jones.

I have to agree with other reviews printed here. The book is something of a mixed bag. Few of the stories are well balanced quality pieces of professional writing. Their strengths and limitations differ.

Some of the stories show a paucity of knowledge about Lovecraft's work. In such stories, only a few of the most general references are made to the Lovecraftean canon. Otherwise the stories just suggest the pursuit of a "nightstalker" figure similar to a sort of Jack the Ripper. To justify the story's inclusion in this collection, the author tosses in a couple of Lovecraft's character names or place names such as "Cthulhu" or "Innsmouth" into the story. Nothing is ever done with these references, mind. That would require too much effort.

Some stories work pretty well because the writer has worked with the material before and knows it well. I think that Richard Lupoff's story "The Voorish Sign" is one of the book's best. But Lupoff has written and published other Sherlock Holmes pastiches over the years. He has a track record, so to speak.

Some of the most intriguing and most enjoyable stories set a Lovecraftian stage beautifully, drawing us in, getting us really eager to move on to the denouement. Unfortunately, it is as though the writer at this point does not know what to do with the situation he/she has established, and just . . . stops. Such is "The Mystery of the Worm" by John Pelan.

A series of biographic sketches appear at the end of the book, profiling the authors of the various stories. Here one sees quite a range of experience. Some of the writers have published a number of books and stories, and seem to have done their share of "weird tales." Others have published very little professionally, and seem to be either beginner professionals or serious amateurs. This may partly explain the sense of unevenness one gets from the book.

If I could ask for one thing, it would be a more genuine knowledge of H.P. Lovecraft's writings by some of the authors. Most of the writers, not surprisingly, have a good sense for Holmes and Watson, since Arthur Conan Doyle's characters are well known through a myriad of books and movies, although even here there are disappointments. One of the weakest stories in the book, "The Drowned Geologist" by Caitlin Kiernan, is just a long letter supposedly written to Dr. Watson -- but we learn at the end of the story, it was never mailed. This story reveals virtually no serious detailed knowledge of either Doyle's OR Lovecraft's writing. In fact, the only evidence that Holmes and Watson are even involved in the story at all comes in the letter's salutation, "My dear Dr. Watson." One suspects the author congratulated herself that she could make a token gesture toward the editors' requirements while writing something else entirely.

I enjoyed the book despite its uneven quality. It is the kind of book that is very good to take on an airplane trip. Three or four of the stories are very good.

Many people have asked, "Why didn't Sherlock Holmes do more to destroy Cthulhu?" The 2002 short story collection "Shadows Over Baker Street" seeks to answer this question.

In this volume you will find many references to Elder Gods, Old Ones, Voorish signs, star stones, R'lyeh, the monstrous half-breeds of Innsmouth, the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, and, of course, the Necronomicon. Being a gamer and having played a few sessions of the 1920s version of the Call Of Cthulhu RPG, I'm vaguely familiar with some of this, but by no means an expert. But you don't really have to be steeped in the esoteric lore of the Cthulhu Mythos in order to enjoy the stories.

Most are told in the standard Watson-narrated "It was a dreary night in the winter of 1887 as Holmes and I smoked contentedly in our Baker Street digs" mold. Some, though, are third-person narratives and one is in an epistolary format. Featured characters include, of course, Holmes and Watson, as well as Mycroft, Moriarty, and Colonel Moran, plus one or two figures from Lovecraftian fiction and an occasional passerby from other assorted fantastic Victoriana.

Neil Gaiman contributed "A Study In Emerald", which won a Hugo award, although I find it clever rather than truly skillful. I kinda got the feeling that they just lobbed a Hugo at him rather randomly because he deserved some kind of trophy. Most of the stories are reasonably good, and there are a couple of standouts.

These latter include Elizabeth Bear's "Tiger! Tiger!", Steve Perry's "The Case Of The Wavy Black Dagger", Steven-Elliott Altman's "A Case Of Royal Blood" (guest-starring one H.G. Wells), Paul Finch's rousing "The Mystery Of The Hanged Man's Puzzle" (possibly one of the few times Holmes has been menaced by a Gatling gun), "The Adventure Of The Arab's Manuscript" by Michael Reeves (editor of this tome, and who years ago wrote the sadly underappreciated fantasy "The Shattered World"), the aforementioned epistolary tale "The Drowned Geologist" by Caitlin Kiernan, and Simon Clark's ingeniously-rendered "Nightmare In Wax".

This collection had the blessings of the Arthur Conan Doyle estate, although I reckon Holmes and company are in the public domain now. So the treatment of the characters is accordingly respectful, and if it is your dream to read about the Great Detective being carried off to Yith by the spawn of Shuggoth, well, then, you'll be disappointed. Good stuff otherwise!

Since I'm such a geek, most of my free time is caught up with various fandoms: Star Trek, and The Lord of the Rings, and others. Now, most fandoms that are around today are based either on television shows or relatively recent novels. There are really only three that spring to mind that are much more than fifty years old. They are the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Cthulhu Mythos stories of H.P. Lovecraft, and the Conan the Barbarian stories of Robert E. Howard. Aside from their shared durability, these three fandoms have one other thing in common: the writing of pastiche stories by writers not the original creators.

Now, in many cases such pastiches are abject failures, for reasons best explained by turning to that oft-used Mark Twain quote about what it sounds like when a woman swears: "She knows the words, but not the music." However untrue that sentiment may be in the modern era, it rings true for, say, the monstrosities perpetrated on Conan by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp, or the Cthulhu-ish efforts of August Derleth, a figure to be welcomed with one hand and struck with the other by any fan of the Mythos, for reasons I haven't the space to go into here. (Find any Lovecraft FAQ only, and there'll be an explanation there, some more even-handed than others.)

With this dubious legacy in mind, I was cautious about approaching the recent anthology Shadows Over Baker Street, edited by Michael Reaves and John Pelan. The central premise of stories combining the worlds of Doyle and Lovecraft certainly left lots of room for failure: consider how few people are capable of producing a good story using either mythos, let alone both put together!

Fortunately, while the collection is not a complete success, my fears were largely unfounded. There are many good stories in Shadows Over Baker Street, and there's enough within to satisfy fans of either mythos. I'll offer some comments on each story.

"A Study in Emerald," by Neil Gaiman: easily my favorite of the collection. I don't want to say too much about it, for reasons that will be clear should you read the story, which I encourage everyone who enjoys Holmes of Cthulhu to do; it's available online from the author's website. What seems to be a simple retelling of "A Study in Scarlet" becomes much more. While the tale as a whole doesn't quite fit the tone of either mythos, there are sections of it that do, and it's still an excellent work.

"Tiger! Tiger!", by Elizabeth Bear: the first of several non-standard stories in the collection. If you need to have Holmes in the story to enjoy it, don't bother with this one; it features a number (to avoid spoilers, I won't specify) of Holmes villains involved in a hunt for a man-eating tiger- or what seems to be a man-eating tiger- in India. Not traditional Holmes or Cthulhu, but not a bad horror story. Recommended.

"The Case of the Wavy Black Dagger," by Steve Perry: not recommended. Ridiculously brief, and a "Mary Sue" fan-fiction to boot. Not bad for Holmesian deduction, though. Set in New York for no reason I can see.

"A Case of Royal Blood," by Steven-Elliot Altman: Holmes and H.G. Wells in the Netherlands. Reasonably entertaining, with a few good Holmes moments and a nice Lovecraftian dream sequence. Recommended, but don't expect too much.

"The Weeping Masks," by James Lowder: recommended. No Holmes; deals with Watson's injury in Afghanistan and subsequent . . . events. Adequate story, with a strong conclusion.

"Art in the Blood," by Brian Stableford: one of the few good mixes of mythoses (mythi?) in the collection. Recommended.

"The Curious Case of Miss Violet Stone," by Poppy Z. Brite and David Ferguson: starts well, but doesn't really get anywhere. Not recommended.

"The Adventure of the Antiquarian's Niece," by Barbara Hambly: second favorite. A strong mix, and well-written. A bit confusing, but still worthwhile.

"The Mystery of the Worm," by John Pelan: meh. Like "Violet Stone," reaches an interesting point and then just stops. Frustrating.

"The Mystery of the Hanged Man's Puzzle," by Paul Finch: solid, if unexceptional. Odd style.

"The Horror of the Many Faces," by Tim Lebbon: not involved enough, but good for what it is.

"The Adventure of the Arab's Manuscript," by Michael Reaves: fun, with a somewhat predictable ending. Also makes use of Watson's time in Afghanistan, but Holmes is in it as well.

"The Drowned Geologist," by Caitlin R. Kiernan: it seems like it'll be good, but then just stops. Very odd, and not recommended.

"A Case of Insomnia," by John P. Vourlis: entertaining, if not exceptionally Lovecraftian. A mild success, marred with a comment by Watson that is so untimely as to jar one right out of the story.

"The Adventure of the Voorish Sign," by Richard A. Lupoff: successful and enjoyable. Not much else to say.

"The Adventure of Exham Priory," by F. Gwynplaine MacIntye: Holmes and the residence from "The Rats in the Walls." Adequate but uninispriring.

"Death Did Not Become Him," by David Niall Wilson and Patricia Lee Macomber: meh. Doesn't get much done, and isn't really Lovecraftian so much as an ethnic horror story. Not recommended.

"Nightmare in Wax," by Simon Clark: has plusses and minuses; in the end, I feel neutral.

All in all, the number of neutral or better stories is enough for me to recommend the whole, which is more than the sum of its parts.

One final note, for Holmes timeliners only: each story is placed by year, but there are some odd choices and some outright errors. I leave them for you to discover, but I find it rather odd that the introduction emphasizes the inclusion of chronological context that isn't right on a basic level. A silly complaint, but given the focus of fandoms on minutiae, it's worth noting.

A fantastic collection, thanks to editors Michael Reaves, and John Phelan.
A great idea and the writers take up the challenge with gusto. Two of the best, The Case of the Antiquarian's Niece by Barbara Hambly, and A Case of Royal Blood are genuine pastiches. The problem is, believing that Holmes would countenance the supernatural in the solution of the cases. Mr. Doyle would have been delighted, especially in his later years, when he became a so called believer in the existence of the hereafter, spirits etc.
The writers have carefully used Lovecraft's trade mark terms:'The Elders', 'The Necronomicon' and 'Cthulhu'. All enough to make the blood of his fans run faster.
Sherlock Holmes fans should also rejoice, in the Weeping Masks, there are details of Watson's wounds received in Afganistan,not in Conan Doyle's accounts. Most stories are expertly crafted and not a single dull one.
Very very enjoyable.

Writing Sherlock Holmes pastiche can't be an easy task, but trying to write pastiche that straddles two distinct and highly differing styles, such as that of Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft, must be doubly difficult. Conan Doyle managed a relatively clean compact form that carried a strong narrative flow and wonderfully combined solid description with well-defined characters. Lovecraft, on the other hand, tended towards more roundabout prose, peppered with archaic and pseudo-archaic language and forms, which said more about atmosphere and a creeping sense of indefinable dread than character. Doyle, in his Sherlock Holmes stories, was concerned mainly with very basically human situations and crime (...no ghosts need apply...), while Lovecraft took on a broader view that incorporated a larger mythic quality while exploring realms of nightmare and cosmic angst. So, the idea of combining these two disparate styles in pastiche, while certainly fascinating as a concept, strikes me as being riddled with many pitfalls for the unwary writer staight from the outset. While the concept certainly isn't new, both P. H. Cannon and Ralph E. Vaughan have tackled it with varying degrees of success in a few small press publications, the idea of a whole collection by a mainstream publisher is, however, decidedly new. Sadly, the result is likely to disappoint both Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes fans alike.

What we have in Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror from Del Ray is a collection of 14 short stories by 20 modern (mainly horror) writers that attempt to place Sherlock Holmes in the context of Lovecraft's Cthulu-riddled nightmare landscape. While any collection of pastiche is likely to contain both hits and misses, this collection, with the clash of styles inherent in the theme, leans heavily towards the latter category. Apparently, for a number of writers, the idea of placing Holmes in Lovecraftian context means little more than having Holmes drawn into a slightly bizarre investigation that leads to a final confrontation with a multi-tentacled monster while someone in the background mutters something about dreaded R'yleh or Cthulhu. There is little or no attempt to create the rich atmosphere of angst that dominates Lovecraft's writing. As a result, Holmes is rarely a recognizable Holmes and the Lovecraft elements fall flat and we are left with stories that are neither fish nor fowl, but an unpalatable blend of the two. Of course even the best of the bunch tend to stumble when it comes to characterization of Holmes or Victorian language usage, so brace yourself for the usual jarring anachronisms and Americanisms.

That being said, there are a few near misses that make the collection not entirely devoid of merit. Amongst these are Tiger! Tiger! by Elizabeth Bear, a fairly rewarding read that makes interesting use of Sebastian Moran and Irene Adler in what turns out to be much more than simply an Indian tiger hunt. In Steven Elliott-Altman's atmospheric and rather successful entry A Case of Royal Blood, we have H. G. Wells doing Watson duty in an effort to assist Holmes in ridding the Dutch Royal family of that most Lovecraftian of creatures - a Shoggoth! In one of the best entries in this collection - Art in the Blood - Brian Stableford has Sherlock reporting to brother Mycroft on his investigations into the creeping chaos that has corrupted the flesh of John Chevaucheux. The story structure with its slowly building sense of dread and grotesque finale is such that it genuinely evokes the creepiness and urgency so typical of Lovecraft's most compelling stories. Barbara Hambly, no stranger to the Victorian milieu, gives us what is likely the best entry in the book. Her piece The Case of the Antiquarian's Niece makes good use of Holmes and has features of Lovecraft's best story - an isolated, inbred family sporting the Innsmouth look! Surprisingly, she also managed to work in an appearance from William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki without using a shoehorn! Definitely my favorite entry in this collection, unlike John Pelan's The Mystery of the Worm, which is a rather paint by numbers effort that features a wasted appearance by Guy Boothby's Dr. Nikola. Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Drowned Geologist features a Lovecraftian-style letter to Watson from someone who thought he had encountered Holmes during the Great Hiatus and demonstrates that the clanging of styles is less of an issue when you drop the Canonical story approach and use a new character's perspective.

On the negative end, oh boy, there is simply too much to cover, but hands-down worst of the lot must be Paul Finch's - The Mystery of the Hanged Man's Puzzle. Structured like a bad pulp-style adventure story, we have a villain attempting to poison London's water supply in a bid to turn the populace into pustule sprouting vegetables to appease the Old Ones. This one was truly awful in every sense, although Tim Lebbon's - The Horror of the Many Faces gives it a run for its money. Watson thinks he's sees Holmes kill an innocent, but malevolent bees are at the heart of the mystery...I kid you not!

As for the rest, well, the less said the better, particularly as I quite like some of these writers when they are in their own element. Neil Gaiman, Simon Clark, and Poppy Z Brite are all far better writers than their entries in this collection would have you believe.

Even though not every story in this anthology is a winner, most were satisfying enough, and ALL managed to imaginatively combine two genres which seemed to me, at first, like oil-and-water (totally unmixable)! But Detective and Horror fiction DO mix, and very well, in this unusual collection.

"Tiger, Tiger!" by Elizabeth Bear was one of my favorites in this volume, but other readers may be more pleased with a more "traditional" tale; say, Poppy Z. Brite and David Ferguson's "The Cusious Case of Miss Violet Stone."

Entertaining reading for fans of both genres.

This has an interesting premise, but not a lot of the authors took advantage of it as well as they could have. At least half the stories are basically H.P. Lovecraft retreads with the main protagonists switched to Holmes and Watson and with happy endings grafted on, since it wouldn't do to have Holmes eaten by the Crawling Chaos or whatever. However, there are a few stories that transcend this formula, and earn it the 4 stars I gave it. Especially interesting is A Case of Royal Blood, in which Watson is replaced by H.G. Wells as sidekick and chronicler, and we see where he gets some of the ideas for the tentacled horrors of War of the Worlds, as well as including a nice history of the world as per Cthulu mythos. And Hugo Award winner Study in Emerald by Neil Gaiman is worth the price of the book by itself. I get the feeling that someone was knocked out by the originality of this story and decided to stretch it to a complete short story collection to cash in on it.

As you can guess from the other reviews, there are mixed feelings about this book. You would think placing Sherlock Holmes in the same universe with the nightmares that are just under the surface of reality would be wonderful. At least there was a chance of him going crazy.
While I did enjoy some of the stories, such as Nightmare In Wax by Simon Clarke, A Study In Emerald by Neil Gaiman, and The Drowned Geologist by Caitlin R. Kiernan which is set in Whitby, most of the stories seem bland and most of the authors seem to be fans of the same Lovecraft stories. Well, Tiger! Tiger! is interesting as Sherlock Holmes is NOT in it, most of the stories seem to repeat the same basic themes and, sometimes, use the same horrors.
I would suggest checking it out of the library or getting it used.