Holmes Vs. Cthulhu: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove

 

It has been a few weeks since I posted on the blog. I'm fine (or as close as anyone can be right now). I just really got caught up in other things. I have a few posts in my ongoing pandemic journal and random thoughts series coming soon. In the meantime, here's a book review!

I suspected this mash up of Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft would be a lighthearted fun read, but I enjoyed Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows at a deeper level than expected.

I find Sherlock Holmes stories lightly amusing and clever, but not terribly deep. I'm a much bigger fan of H. P. Lovecraft than Arthur Conan Doyle. But the way that Lovegrove brings their mythoi together shows that Holmes has a deeper side than I previously thought.

It took me a while to get into this book, because there's a lot more Holmes than Cthulhu for the first 100 pages or so (it is narrated by Dr. Watson, so that's to be expected).

But once the Lovecraftian elements find their way into the narrative, Lovegrove sets up an interesting contrast between Holmesian Victorian rationality and Lovecraftian absurdity. I mean "absurdity" in the sense of Albert Camus, of course, and the contrast here is much like the contrast Camus sees between the human sense of value and the cold, uncaring universe. In effect, Holmes becomes a Lovecraft protagonist convinced that the universe is a place that makes sense who then discovers that this whole framework is about to be shattered, which, like all cosmic horror, prompts some deep thoughts about human knowledge and our place in the cosmos. Great stuff.

(Random thought: Maybe the fact that Doyle himself was a big believer in paranormal stuff like ghosts and fairies shows that something like this tension was in the Holmes stories all along?)

(Another random thought: One thing Holmes is wrong about is that he relies on induction, not deduction. No matter how good he is at gathering clues, there's always a chance he can be wrong, unlike the case in deductive logic, which is a logically guaranteed connection between premises and conclusion. As a matter of pure logic, he can be wrong about things, even if he rarely is. Maybe what I find so satisfying about this novel is that Holmes is finally wrong about something! In a pretty fundamental way: he's wrong about whether the universe is amenable to human understanding.)

This isn't to say that Sherlock Holmes fans won't find anything here. You have the engaging dynamic between Holmes and Watson. You might even meet a few favorite characters. And Lovegrove really nails the writing style, too.

The best audience for this book would be people who love both Cthulhu and Holmes equally, but I can report that as someone who leans more toward the Cthulhu side that I found this to be really fun and interesting. If even Sherlock Holmes can't make sense of this universe, maybe it's okay that the rest of us can't, either.

See also my Goodreads review.