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james_siebs's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.75
I liked the overall combination of mystery and sci-fi/horror in this book. However, I found the journal sections much too long. Excluding Watson and Holmes from such a large portion of the book did not serve it well, in my opinion.
I also found some of the language used to describe racial minorities was uncomfortable; even though it was historically accurate, I found it was unnecessary and the same ends could have been achieved by not othering indigenous and black people.
I also found some of the language used to describe racial minorities was uncomfortable; even though it was historically accurate, I found it was unnecessary and the same ends could have been achieved by not othering indigenous and black people.
nakole's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
๐ข๐ฑ๐ฎ๐ป๐ต๐ธ๐ฌ๐ด ๐๐ธ๐ต๐ถ๐ฎ๐ผ & ๐ฝ๐ฑ๐ฎ ๐๐ฒ๐ผ๐ด๐ช๐ฝ๐ธ๐ท๐ฒ๐ฌ ๐๐ธ๐ท๐ผ๐ฝ๐ป๐ธ๐ผ๐ฒ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ผ
Sherlock Holmes Cthulhu Book 2
By: James Lovegrove
Lovecraftian Mystery
๐ช๐๐๐๐ถ๐๐ 2.5/5
๐
๐๐๐พ๐๐: I actually really enjoyed the format of this book. When I first opened it I was skeptical but I am definitely open to reading another book in this format. I actually really enjoyed the format of this book. When I first opened it I was skeptical but I am definitely open to reading another book in this format. I actually really enjoyed the format of this book. When I first opened it I was skeptical but I am definitely open to reading another book in this format.
๐ ๐น๐ถ๐๐๐๐พ๐๐ ๐ฌ๐๐๐๐:
โThe game is afoot.โ
๐ฏ๐๐พ๐๐๐๐ ๐ฒ๐ถ๐๐๐พ๐๐๐:
Racism, Death, Forced institutionalization, Murder, gore, mental illness, medical content, medical trauma, toxic friendship, ableism, classism, animal cruelty, animal death, unethical science experiments
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Cursing, Death, Gore, Racial slurs, Racism, Toxic relationship, Violence, Blood, Medical content, Murder, Injury/Injury detail, and Classism
lars1993's review against another edition
4.0
Disclaimer: the pagecount from these quotes might be off, as I've based them on a wonky epub version of the book.
"It seemed sacrilegious to dub them gods, those terrible ancient beings that lay at the fringes of the universe and in the depths of the planet, biding their time, ever ready to arise and enslave mankind. Yet creatures so numinously powerful could scarcely be called anything else." (p. 49)
"Civilisation is thin ice, is it not? With a cold darkness below. And most people skate on it all unknowing, little realising how it could give way beneath them at any moment." (p. 50)
"Are they [the gods] mentally deranged or sane? How do we know? How can we mere mortals, with our limited faculties and circumscribed perceptions, measure those fathomless minds of theirs? How can we hope to divine the motivations, the emotions, of star-spawned beings from beyond? Everything about them is utterly alien. Perhaps they are all quite mad. Perhaps the eons spent in the gulfs of space and the depths of the earth have driven them over the brink of rationality and there is nothing within them now but howling chaos."
"And evil."
"Or something we only call evil because we cannot interpret it any other way. To them it might be necessity, or whim, or expedience."
"The will to subjugate and eliminate the human race surely cannot be considered any of those things," I said.
"Really? Imagine you are a wasp and I swat you with a rolled-up newspaper. Does that make me evil? I was only riddling myself of a nuisance. Or, let us say you are a sheep and I shear you for your wool then send you to the abattoir to become mutton. I am not a thief or a murderer. I am a famer."
"A fair point, I suppose."
"What if, by believing the Outer Gods and the Great Old Ones hate us, we are exalting our own importance unduly? What if they harbour nothing for us but, at best, a mild disdain? So great is their power compared with ours that they have no real cause to fear us. It is, contrariwise, our fear of them that leads us to interpret their actions as evil." (p. 84-85)
"The jar nearest to me, for instance, held what looked like a tarantula, albeit larger and hairier than the example I had seen on display at the Natural History Museum. Only on closer inspection did I realise that this spider had ten legs instead of the customary eight and that transparent wings sprouted from its back. The label stated that it hailed from the jungles of the Niger basin.
Likewise, what I took at first glance to be a coiled-up snake - some kind of constrictor, its body as thick around as my forearm - proved to be more akin to a worm. It had skin rather than scales and two weird slits at one end, which were either eyes or nostrils. Then there were a score of tadpole-like things floating in a cluster, their place of origin a lake at Plitvice, Croatia. The body of each was larger than my fist and their tails were fused together at he tips, so that in all they resembled the head of a flower, albeit one made of flesh rather than vegetable matter." (p. 118)
"My eye was caught by a true aberration: a jellyfish whose greyish pulpy frame was studded with dozens of protruding spheres. Organelles or polyps, I thought, leaning in for a closer look.
Then one of the spheres split open along a fissure to reveal an eye." (p. 119)
"After the events detailed in The Shadwell Shadows, and being hardly a man of action, Mycroft resolved to do it on his own terms, in a manner that suited him and his proclivities. Siting the Dagon within the Diogenes was not just a personal convenience, but also ironically fitting. A place where speech was forbidden, where a handful of men would arbitrate upon the unspeakable." (p. 130)
"(...) and then there was an almighty shattering of glass as a nightmarish beast broke through our sitting-room window - a large hulking thing with webbed feet and membranous wings; an amalgamation of buzzard, bat, wasp and more besides, but also corpse-like in appearance, rotted-looking and emaciated. (...) able to fly through the vacuum of space, interstellar steeds for those with the wherewithal to tame them and the audacity to ride them (...)." (p. 147)
""Nightgaunt." W'gnns uttered the word with a trepidation that was shared by his fellows. One of the snake men moaned, a couple of them cringed, and I understood then that even monsters found some things monstrous. There was a hierarchy amongst horrors." (p. 192)
"No, I would not be the Triophidian Crown's willing victim. I would not be parasitised.
The voice quailed before my resolve. Now, all at once, the crown was submissive. It was eager to please. What did I want from it?
I directed my gaze upon the approaching snake men. The crown knew its duty. It could grant me control over them. All it asked for in return was a little of my energy, a mere sample, a taste...
This was untrue, of course. The Triophidian Crown never took "just a little". Invariably it extracted its pound of flesh - or more - from the wearer. The wearer simply had to ensure that he got something in return, making the crown earn its keep." (p. 205)
"The Necronomicon is a book like no other. Each copy is imbued with the very essence of evil. Even the title, which translates from the Greek as "an image of the law of the dead", resonates with wrongness, although not perhaps as much as its original Arabic title, Al Azif, a phrase commonly held to refer to the sound of insects at night which, in Middle Eastern tradition, is equated with the howling of demons. Then one must reconsider the trail of misery and death the book has left in its wake, with almost anyone who has been involved in printing, translating or using it meeting a grisly end. To call it cursed would be to sell it short." (p. 241)
"The potion was the result of an hour Holmes had spent at his acid-scarred chemistry bench, brewing together ingredients such as aconite, mandrake root and camphor in a flask suspended by a clamp from a retort stand. To these he had added the shred of the nightgaunt's wing, heating the mixture over a flame until it reduced to a thick, dark brown sludge. The smell of it had been obnoxious, and one could only assume the taste of it would be no better. Moreover, the concoction was at least mildly toxic. Aconite alone, taken in sufficient quantity, can induce fatal hypotension and cardiac arrhythmia, camphor has been known to cause hallucinations and sometimes liver damage when ingested, and who knows what the effect of consuming nightgaunt meat might be?
This substance, however, was what Holmes was proposing to swallow, in the full expectation that it would grant him control over the nightgaunt. The potion, known as the Nangchen Lamasery Liquor of Supremacy, was first devised by Tibetan monks in order to counter the threat of rakshasas, their term for various anthropophagous demons. Abdul Alhazred has it that by eating the flesh of a flesh-eating demon on enters into a kind of compact with the creature, and it is through this weird reciprocity that the Liquor or Supremacy operates. Ludwig Prinn, in his De Vermis Mysteriis, agrees with Alhazred while adding the proviso that the potion leaves the user liable to develop lasting cannibalistic tendencies, a caveat which the compiler of the Necronomicon ought to have had the courtesy to mention and might indeed have done, had he been less of a luncatic." (p. 276-278)
"(...) secured the parrot in place on a table using clamps, the bird protesting volubly and resisting strenuously when subjected to such undignified treatment. Even after it was pinned down and unmobilised, its screeches were ear-splitting, not least as the drill-bit burrowed into the base of its skull and the hypodermic needles followed one after another, each delivering its tiny load of serum, which then had to be left for a precise number of seconds so that it could take effect. Blood and feathers bedecked the table top, and by the end the parrot was left a squalling, twitching mess, a shell of its former self." (p. 371)
"(...) dark part of the forest. I use "dark" both in the literal sense and the figurative. The trees clustered close together, screening out much of the daylight, but there was more to it than that. There was a feeling, an atmosphere. It is hard to describe but I had come to recognise it over the course of our previous expeditions. Whenever we neared the spot where lurked on of those creatures of questionable classification, my hackles would begin to rise and my nerves would be set on edge. Possibly some primordial instinct within me was coming to the fore; some ancient, deep-buried sense of alarm was being triggered. To put it plainly, I always knew when we were verging on one of those forbidden places of which Amos Russell had spoken, but I knew without knowing quite how I knew." (p. 475)
"The disgust engendered in me by the sight of the active shoggoth - the sheer wrongness of it, as its gelatinous body rippled and purled like black curdled cream - had me shrinking away. Every fibre of my being was repelled." (p. 496)
"Then something in its side opened up, like a sphincter dilating. It was one of those pores that I had hypothesised was a stoma or a spiracle. Now I reckoned it to serve and altogether different function. It was some kind of portal, a means of interface between the shoggoth and the world around it, a breach allowing access from its environment to its inmost self and vice versa. One might term it mouth or eye or ear, or even nostril, but one would be wrong. It was all of those at once and more besides, and it gaped in front of Charley and he stared deep into its hollowness, and then he began to shriek, a high-pitched, quavering wail quite at odds with the low rumble of his normal speaking voice. It was an aria of horror, as though his very spirit was escaping like steam from a boiling kettle. His body shruddered, his eyes rolled up until only the whites showed, and even Junior, for all his abject distress, fell silent, rendered dumbstruck by the greater, more heartfelt torment of another." (p. 501)
"Conroy steeled himself. Then, all at once, he stiffened. His face took on a different cast, becoming paler and weirdly attenuated. His eye sockets seemed to deepen, his brown to enlarge. His head hunched forward upon his neck, while his shoulders sagged somewhat. The transformation took no more than a few seconds, and by the end we were looking at the same man, yet superimposed upon him there was another, one who was not as erect-spined and handsome as Nathaniel Whateley and who gazed upon us with a glittering-eyed intensity that was thoroughly disconcerting. This was neither Conroy nor Whateley, but a third party, an eldritch god incarnated in human form.
And then he spoke.
And then everything that was hitherto murky became crystal clear.
Appalingly so." (p. 614)
"The sun was high, the sky was bright. Together, Sherlock Holmes and I struck out across the marshes along a raised pathway. Birds trilled in the hedgerows. Holmes whistled a tune. A stranger might be forgiven for thinking us simply a pair of friends out for a country stroll, neither of us with a care in the world.
Yet, at our backs, a pall of smoke hung on the horizon; a legacy of horrors past and a sobering portent of things to come." (p. 644)
"It seemed sacrilegious to dub them gods, those terrible ancient beings that lay at the fringes of the universe and in the depths of the planet, biding their time, ever ready to arise and enslave mankind. Yet creatures so numinously powerful could scarcely be called anything else." (p. 49)
"Civilisation is thin ice, is it not? With a cold darkness below. And most people skate on it all unknowing, little realising how it could give way beneath them at any moment." (p. 50)
"Are they [the gods] mentally deranged or sane? How do we know? How can we mere mortals, with our limited faculties and circumscribed perceptions, measure those fathomless minds of theirs? How can we hope to divine the motivations, the emotions, of star-spawned beings from beyond? Everything about them is utterly alien. Perhaps they are all quite mad. Perhaps the eons spent in the gulfs of space and the depths of the earth have driven them over the brink of rationality and there is nothing within them now but howling chaos."
"And evil."
"Or something we only call evil because we cannot interpret it any other way. To them it might be necessity, or whim, or expedience."
"The will to subjugate and eliminate the human race surely cannot be considered any of those things," I said.
"Really? Imagine you are a wasp and I swat you with a rolled-up newspaper. Does that make me evil? I was only riddling myself of a nuisance. Or, let us say you are a sheep and I shear you for your wool then send you to the abattoir to become mutton. I am not a thief or a murderer. I am a famer."
"A fair point, I suppose."
"What if, by believing the Outer Gods and the Great Old Ones hate us, we are exalting our own importance unduly? What if they harbour nothing for us but, at best, a mild disdain? So great is their power compared with ours that they have no real cause to fear us. It is, contrariwise, our fear of them that leads us to interpret their actions as evil." (p. 84-85)
"The jar nearest to me, for instance, held what looked like a tarantula, albeit larger and hairier than the example I had seen on display at the Natural History Museum. Only on closer inspection did I realise that this spider had ten legs instead of the customary eight and that transparent wings sprouted from its back. The label stated that it hailed from the jungles of the Niger basin.
Likewise, what I took at first glance to be a coiled-up snake - some kind of constrictor, its body as thick around as my forearm - proved to be more akin to a worm. It had skin rather than scales and two weird slits at one end, which were either eyes or nostrils. Then there were a score of tadpole-like things floating in a cluster, their place of origin a lake at Plitvice, Croatia. The body of each was larger than my fist and their tails were fused together at he tips, so that in all they resembled the head of a flower, albeit one made of flesh rather than vegetable matter." (p. 118)
"My eye was caught by a true aberration: a jellyfish whose greyish pulpy frame was studded with dozens of protruding spheres. Organelles or polyps, I thought, leaning in for a closer look.
Then one of the spheres split open along a fissure to reveal an eye." (p. 119)
"After the events detailed in The Shadwell Shadows, and being hardly a man of action, Mycroft resolved to do it on his own terms, in a manner that suited him and his proclivities. Siting the Dagon within the Diogenes was not just a personal convenience, but also ironically fitting. A place where speech was forbidden, where a handful of men would arbitrate upon the unspeakable." (p. 130)
"(...) and then there was an almighty shattering of glass as a nightmarish beast broke through our sitting-room window - a large hulking thing with webbed feet and membranous wings; an amalgamation of buzzard, bat, wasp and more besides, but also corpse-like in appearance, rotted-looking and emaciated. (...) able to fly through the vacuum of space, interstellar steeds for those with the wherewithal to tame them and the audacity to ride them (...)." (p. 147)
""Nightgaunt." W'gnns uttered the word with a trepidation that was shared by his fellows. One of the snake men moaned, a couple of them cringed, and I understood then that even monsters found some things monstrous. There was a hierarchy amongst horrors." (p. 192)
"No, I would not be the Triophidian Crown's willing victim. I would not be parasitised.
The voice quailed before my resolve. Now, all at once, the crown was submissive. It was eager to please. What did I want from it?
I directed my gaze upon the approaching snake men. The crown knew its duty. It could grant me control over them. All it asked for in return was a little of my energy, a mere sample, a taste...
This was untrue, of course. The Triophidian Crown never took "just a little". Invariably it extracted its pound of flesh - or more - from the wearer. The wearer simply had to ensure that he got something in return, making the crown earn its keep." (p. 205)
"The Necronomicon is a book like no other. Each copy is imbued with the very essence of evil. Even the title, which translates from the Greek as "an image of the law of the dead", resonates with wrongness, although not perhaps as much as its original Arabic title, Al Azif, a phrase commonly held to refer to the sound of insects at night which, in Middle Eastern tradition, is equated with the howling of demons. Then one must reconsider the trail of misery and death the book has left in its wake, with almost anyone who has been involved in printing, translating or using it meeting a grisly end. To call it cursed would be to sell it short." (p. 241)
"The potion was the result of an hour Holmes had spent at his acid-scarred chemistry bench, brewing together ingredients such as aconite, mandrake root and camphor in a flask suspended by a clamp from a retort stand. To these he had added the shred of the nightgaunt's wing, heating the mixture over a flame until it reduced to a thick, dark brown sludge. The smell of it had been obnoxious, and one could only assume the taste of it would be no better. Moreover, the concoction was at least mildly toxic. Aconite alone, taken in sufficient quantity, can induce fatal hypotension and cardiac arrhythmia, camphor has been known to cause hallucinations and sometimes liver damage when ingested, and who knows what the effect of consuming nightgaunt meat might be?
This substance, however, was what Holmes was proposing to swallow, in the full expectation that it would grant him control over the nightgaunt. The potion, known as the Nangchen Lamasery Liquor of Supremacy, was first devised by Tibetan monks in order to counter the threat of rakshasas, their term for various anthropophagous demons. Abdul Alhazred has it that by eating the flesh of a flesh-eating demon on enters into a kind of compact with the creature, and it is through this weird reciprocity that the Liquor or Supremacy operates. Ludwig Prinn, in his De Vermis Mysteriis, agrees with Alhazred while adding the proviso that the potion leaves the user liable to develop lasting cannibalistic tendencies, a caveat which the compiler of the Necronomicon ought to have had the courtesy to mention and might indeed have done, had he been less of a luncatic." (p. 276-278)
"(...) secured the parrot in place on a table using clamps, the bird protesting volubly and resisting strenuously when subjected to such undignified treatment. Even after it was pinned down and unmobilised, its screeches were ear-splitting, not least as the drill-bit burrowed into the base of its skull and the hypodermic needles followed one after another, each delivering its tiny load of serum, which then had to be left for a precise number of seconds so that it could take effect. Blood and feathers bedecked the table top, and by the end the parrot was left a squalling, twitching mess, a shell of its former self." (p. 371)
"(...) dark part of the forest. I use "dark" both in the literal sense and the figurative. The trees clustered close together, screening out much of the daylight, but there was more to it than that. There was a feeling, an atmosphere. It is hard to describe but I had come to recognise it over the course of our previous expeditions. Whenever we neared the spot where lurked on of those creatures of questionable classification, my hackles would begin to rise and my nerves would be set on edge. Possibly some primordial instinct within me was coming to the fore; some ancient, deep-buried sense of alarm was being triggered. To put it plainly, I always knew when we were verging on one of those forbidden places of which Amos Russell had spoken, but I knew without knowing quite how I knew." (p. 475)
"The disgust engendered in me by the sight of the active shoggoth - the sheer wrongness of it, as its gelatinous body rippled and purled like black curdled cream - had me shrinking away. Every fibre of my being was repelled." (p. 496)
"Then something in its side opened up, like a sphincter dilating. It was one of those pores that I had hypothesised was a stoma or a spiracle. Now I reckoned it to serve and altogether different function. It was some kind of portal, a means of interface between the shoggoth and the world around it, a breach allowing access from its environment to its inmost self and vice versa. One might term it mouth or eye or ear, or even nostril, but one would be wrong. It was all of those at once and more besides, and it gaped in front of Charley and he stared deep into its hollowness, and then he began to shriek, a high-pitched, quavering wail quite at odds with the low rumble of his normal speaking voice. It was an aria of horror, as though his very spirit was escaping like steam from a boiling kettle. His body shruddered, his eyes rolled up until only the whites showed, and even Junior, for all his abject distress, fell silent, rendered dumbstruck by the greater, more heartfelt torment of another." (p. 501)
"Conroy steeled himself. Then, all at once, he stiffened. His face took on a different cast, becoming paler and weirdly attenuated. His eye sockets seemed to deepen, his brown to enlarge. His head hunched forward upon his neck, while his shoulders sagged somewhat. The transformation took no more than a few seconds, and by the end we were looking at the same man, yet superimposed upon him there was another, one who was not as erect-spined and handsome as Nathaniel Whateley and who gazed upon us with a glittering-eyed intensity that was thoroughly disconcerting. This was neither Conroy nor Whateley, but a third party, an eldritch god incarnated in human form.
And then he spoke.
And then everything that was hitherto murky became crystal clear.
Appalingly so." (p. 614)
"The sun was high, the sky was bright. Together, Sherlock Holmes and I struck out across the marshes along a raised pathway. Birds trilled in the hedgerows. Holmes whistled a tune. A stranger might be forgiven for thinking us simply a pair of friends out for a country stroll, neither of us with a care in the world.
Yet, at our backs, a pall of smoke hung on the horizon; a legacy of horrors past and a sobering portent of things to come." (p. 644)
tobin_elliott's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
I don't know what it was about this one, but it just kind of was...there. It felt better than the first one, perhaps because there was slightly less erasure of the Holmes canon than in the first one. But the entire concept felt far more far-fetched. And Holmes seems to be being written less and less like the classic Holmes.
Change the canon if you feel you must, but changing Holmes is not acceptable.
I'll likely finish off the third in this series, but I doubt I'll carry on with the five past that, unless he pulls a spectacular rabbit out of his hat.
Change the canon if you feel you must, but changing Holmes is not acceptable.
I'll likely finish off the third in this series, but I doubt I'll carry on with the five past that, unless he pulls a spectacular rabbit out of his hat.
nnoyes's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
hirvimaki's review against another edition
3.0
I was not as taken with this one as much as book one. I get what Lovegrove was trying to do, emulating the structure of A Study in Scarlet, but it fell a little short for me and I would much rather have had Holmes and Watson and less about the backstory of Miskatonic University. Still fun. Just not as much fun.
kirinna's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Death, Racial slurs, Racism, Forced institutionalization, Grief, and Murder
makaylia's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5