A review by towards_morning
A Study In Lavender: Queering Sherlock Holmes by Steve Berman, Elka Cloke, Ruth Sims, Joseph R.G. DeMarco, Rajan Khanna, Stephen Osborne
2.0
I found this to be a hugely mixed bag.
About half the stories in this collection are basically serviceable; a lot of them sort of end up running into each other, riffing on similar themes over and over, often adhering to a specific set of tropes. A couple of them are then very good, with more interesting set ups and good prose. I got this book cheaply, and consider it to have been worth the cost for those stories I enjoyed.
There are also a couple that I found distinctly uncomfortable and to play into some really harmful ideas of what queering the text has to entail; ones that play into long-outdated stereotypes of queer sexuality, and what stories about queer sexuality must include, without a hint of self-awareness or subversion. It's not that I think stories about queer/etc. people 'can't' include certain things, but the framing of those things is important when it comes along with long histories of baggage.
Another thing that frustrated me is that for an anthology that attempts to be subversive in some way, the range of 'queerness' on offer is predictably limited. It's largely, as ever, cis gay men. True, one might argue that the Holmes framework doesn't allow for much else, but to be honest I think that's setting the bar low. Some imagination and a willingness to walk further outside the limitations of the canon would have been more interesting and varied, in my opinion.
Finally, a lot of these stories don't do much with the fact that they're set in the Holmes canon, to be frank. They're just set in it because they are. Very few of the stories here had to be told via Holmes, and I think, again, that's a lack of vision and a wasted opportunity.
It really just didn't grab me as a collection, in the end.
About half the stories in this collection are basically serviceable; a lot of them sort of end up running into each other, riffing on similar themes over and over, often adhering to a specific set of tropes. A couple of them are then very good, with more interesting set ups and good prose. I got this book cheaply, and consider it to have been worth the cost for those stories I enjoyed.
There are also a couple that I found distinctly uncomfortable and to play into some really harmful ideas of what queering the text has to entail; ones that play into long-outdated stereotypes of queer sexuality, and what stories about queer sexuality must include, without a hint of self-awareness or subversion. It's not that I think stories about queer/etc. people 'can't' include certain things, but the framing of those things is important when it comes along with long histories of baggage.
Another thing that frustrated me is that for an anthology that attempts to be subversive in some way, the range of 'queerness' on offer is predictably limited. It's largely, as ever, cis gay men. True, one might argue that the Holmes framework doesn't allow for much else, but to be honest I think that's setting the bar low. Some imagination and a willingness to walk further outside the limitations of the canon would have been more interesting and varied, in my opinion.
Finally, a lot of these stories don't do much with the fact that they're set in the Holmes canon, to be frank. They're just set in it because they are. Very few of the stories here had to be told via Holmes, and I think, again, that's a lack of vision and a wasted opportunity.
It really just didn't grab me as a collection, in the end.