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igenlodeThis book looked interesting enough to start off with (and seemed to be doing a decent pastiche of Watson), but managed to annoy me in two different directions. First of all and chiefly, the author has gone for the oh-so-trendy revisionist take of 'the heroes are really the villains and the villains are really the heroes' -- so while Holmes and Watson are in this case still the protagonists, they are allied with noble Dracula and his ever-devoted Mina (whom we are assured was never married to that pathetic Jonathan Harker) and an unjustly-accused Edward Hyde whom everyone is prejudiced against but wouldn't hurt a fly (that man he brutally beat to death in canon? it was all an accident), against wicked 'Lord Holmwood', the 'Lord of Godalming' and the arch-enemy Van Helsing. Dr Jekyll, of course, is despicable.
I'm afraid fandom's take on the poor innocent Phantom of the Opera who is unjustly persecuted by Evil Aristocrat Raoul has soured me on what little tolerance I had for that sort of thing in the first place. It just comes across to me as virtue-signalling at the expense of the Victorians.
Secondly, while I was initially impressed by the job the author was doing in reproducing Watson's narrative voice, the suspension of disbelief started to break down when the author perpetrates a series of howlers, such as the aforementioned deaf ear to honorifics, having a rich character inhabit a 'Manor' in the middle of London, referring to Van Helsing as having "Dutch heritage", talking about "the blonde man" and having Holmes suggest "a railroad spike" as a lockpick (our rails sit in chairs bolted down to railway sleepers). There are also some very laboured attempts at being 'period,' where Watson is supposedly trying to overcome his shock at unladylike behaviour, that simply came across as a caricature of beliefs about beliefs. (At the beginning I had to turn back when "footsteps came up the stairs and our door flew open, admitting Lestrade", in order to confirm that Mrs Hudson had indeed, as I remembered, "tried the door, found it locked, and then harrumphed" five pages earlier, but that was the only actual internal inconsistency I noted -- although admittedly I was very much skimming towards the end.) I don't remember Conan Doyle's narrator ever referring to the official detectives as "the Yarders", whereas this book uses the epithet a lot, and in a way that jarred; it also throws in every single detective ever mentioned in any of the stories and has them milling around en masse, which doesn't seem to serve any purpose other than to please the fans.
The characterisation redeems itself slightly by suggesting that Van Helsing, rather than being pure evil, is motivated, in his attempts to summon Cthulu(!) and bring about the end of the world, by a desperate desire to prevent vampirism inevitably subjugating all mankind after his failure to stop Dracula: "Humanity and the monstrous vampires shall perish together, all across the globe. There can be no other way" and having Mina show some sympathy for Holmwood, who was supposedly her friend. However, the whole business of having Watson himself be a vampire, which the author was presumably stuck with after having made it a plot point in what I understand to have been a previous book in the series, didn't seem to serve any purpose at all other than involving a lot of -- again -- laboured explaining as to why he didn't have the superpowers that the other victims of 'the blood disease' did, and was drinking animal blood out of a teapot, and feeling sleepy in the daytime (whilst not in fact being discommoded significantly by any of these things for plot purposes; I realise now that it reminds me of the 'balancing flaws' introduced by fanfic writers struggling to create that mystical thing called an Original Character, known to the rest of us as 'a person' like any other...)
As pastiche B-movie mashup thrillers go, it's not badly done. But I've read better Sherlock-Holmes-meets-Cthulu spinoffs and better Holmes fanfic; this one managed to annoy me with its subliminal air of superiority and revisionism. Christian Klaver is no Kim Newman; I didn't *enjoy* "Anno Dracula", but that is undoubtedly a much better book.
I'm afraid fandom's take on the poor innocent Phantom of the Opera who is unjustly persecuted by Evil Aristocrat Raoul has soured me on what little tolerance I had for that sort of thing in the first place. It just comes across to me as virtue-signalling at the expense of the Victorians.
Secondly, while I was initially impressed by the job the author was doing in reproducing Watson's narrative voice, the suspension of disbelief started to break down when the author perpetrates a series of howlers, such as the aforementioned deaf ear to honorifics, having a rich character inhabit a 'Manor' in the middle of London, referring to Van Helsing as having "Dutch heritage", talking about "the blonde man" and having Holmes suggest "a railroad spike" as a lockpick (our rails sit in chairs bolted down to railway sleepers). There are also some very laboured attempts at being 'period,' where Watson is supposedly trying to overcome his shock at unladylike behaviour, that simply came across as a caricature of beliefs about beliefs. (At the beginning I had to turn back when "footsteps came up the stairs and our door flew open, admitting Lestrade", in order to confirm that Mrs Hudson had indeed, as I remembered, "tried the door, found it locked, and then harrumphed" five pages earlier, but that was the only actual internal inconsistency I noted -- although admittedly I was very much skimming towards the end.) I don't remember Conan Doyle's narrator ever referring to the official detectives as "the Yarders", whereas this book uses the epithet a lot, and in a way that jarred; it also throws in every single detective ever mentioned in any of the stories and has them milling around en masse, which doesn't seem to serve any purpose other than to please the fans.
The characterisation redeems itself slightly by suggesting that Van Helsing, rather than being pure evil, is motivated, in his attempts to summon Cthulu(!) and bring about the end of the world, by a desperate desire to prevent vampirism inevitably subjugating all mankind after his failure to stop Dracula: "Humanity and the monstrous vampires shall perish together, all across the globe. There can be no other way" and having Mina show some sympathy for Holmwood, who was supposedly her friend. However, the whole business of having Watson himself be a vampire, which the author was presumably stuck with after having made it a plot point in what I understand to have been a previous book in the series, didn't seem to serve any purpose at all other than involving a lot of -- again -- laboured explaining as to why he didn't have the superpowers that the other victims of 'the blood disease' did, and was drinking animal blood out of a teapot, and feeling sleepy in the daytime (whilst not in fact being discommoded significantly by any of these things for plot purposes; I realise now that it reminds me of the 'balancing flaws' introduced by fanfic writers struggling to create that mystical thing called an Original Character, known to the rest of us as 'a person' like any other...)
As pastiche B-movie mashup thrillers go, it's not badly done. But I've read better Sherlock-Holmes-meets-Cthulu spinoffs and better Holmes fanfic; this one managed to annoy me with its subliminal air of superiority and revisionism. Christian Klaver is no Kim Newman; I didn't *enjoy* "Anno Dracula", but that is undoubtedly a much better book.