Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities
The Cthulhu Casebooks
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4.4 • 16 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
It is the spring of 1895, and more than a decade of combating eldritch entities has cost Dr John Watson his beloved wife Mary, and nearly broken the health of Sherlock Holmes. Yet the companions do not hesitate when they are called to the infamous Bedlam lunatic asylum, where they find an inmate speaking in R’lyehian, the language of the Old Ones. Moreover, the man is horribly scarred and has no memory of who he is.
The detectives discover that the inmate was once a scientist, a student of Miskatonic University, and one of two survivors of a doomed voyage down the Miskatonic River to capture the semi-mythical shoggoth. Yet how has he ended up in London, without his wits? And when the man is taken from Bedlam by forces beyond normal mortal comprehension, it becomes clear that there is far more to the case than one disturbed Bostonian. It is only by learning what truly happened on that fateful New England voyage that Holmes and Watson will uncover the truth, and learn who is behind the Miskatonic monstrosity…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
