The Arcanum (2005) by Thomas Wheeler: If there were an award for worst fictional depiction of H.P. Lovecraft, this novel would certainly finish in the Top 5.
At least.
Screenwriter Thomas Wheeler tries for a sort of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, only with real people and not fictional characters. This team is The Arcanum of the title and in this novel consists of H.P. Lovecraft, Harry Houdini, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Louisiana Voudon 'Queen' Marie Laveau.
Set in 1920's New York, The Arcanum pits our rag-tag group of ghost-busters against a sinister plot that's actually a large-scale version of a standalone, supernatural-themed episode of The X-Files. Many references appear to earlier adventures of The Arcanum, now deprived of its creator as his murder by telepathy starts the events of the novel in motion.
Wheeler depicts Lovecraft as a slightly less cowardly, more magicky version of Ichabod Crane in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow. Houdini is a bland cipher. It's hard to make Houdini boring, but Wheeler does it. Conan Doyle gets the most prominent role as the de facto leader of The Arcanum. He may be in his early 60's, but Doyle is totally buckling those swashes against the forces of Evil.
It really doesn't help matters that Wheeler wedges Lovecraft's Great Old Ones into a fairly standard Christian narrative in which the Devil, angels, and Nephilim all appear. Aleister Crowley shows up as a lazily written Crowley, twirling his mustache and leering. OK, he doesn't have a mustache. But he is a one-dimensional jerk.
Perhaps the most unintentionally funny moment comes when Lovecraft wields one of the Eltdown Shards. The shards were created by Richard Searight and used by HPL in his portion of the group-story "The Challenge from Beyond." However, Wheeler, who does not seem to do research all that much, re-imagines the Shards as the fossilized arm of some creature, enhanced by what is basically an Iron Man glove to tap their power. And here I thought they were tablets!
There are probably thousands of better stories featuring HPL, Houdini, and Doyle as characters. Hell, you can just read the story HPL ghost-wrote for Houdini, "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," aka "Under the Pyramids." You can read about a fictional team-up of Houdini and Conan Doyle in William Hjortsberg's excellent 1996 novel Nevermore. Or you can read The Arcanum and laugh and laugh... Not recommended.
Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes (2008) edited by Charles Prepolec and J.R. Campbell, containing the following stories:
The Lost Boy by Barbara Hambly; His Last Arrow by Christopher Sequeira; The Things That Shall Come Upon Them by Barbara Roden; The Finishing Stroke by M.J. Elliott; Sherlock Holmes in the Lost World by Martin Powell; The Grantchester Grimoire by Rick Kennett and Chico Kidd; The Steamship Friesland by Peter Calamai; The Entwined by J.R. Campbell; Merridew of Abominable Memory by Chris Roberson; Red Sunset by Bob Madison; and The Red Planet League by Kim Newman.
The first of Canada's EDGE Publishing's anthologies of weird Sherlock Holmes homages is fun, for the most part, with a few stand-outs. When putting Holmes into supernatural situations, writers tend to either make Holmes a stubborn denier, regardless of the evidence, or to make his detection ethos flexible enough to admit any possibility. Sometimes writers go even further, generally by reimagining Holmes as someone who's always been a believer in the supernatural.
The 'fantastic' herein involves a lot of stories that combine Holmes with other fictional or historical characters. Team-ups pair Holmes with Peter Pan ("The Lost Boy") , supernatural investigator Flaxman Low ("The Things That Shall Come Upon Them"), supernatural investigator Carnacki ("The Grantchester Grimoire") , and Arthur Conan Doyle's own Professor Challenger ("Sherlock Holmes in the Lost World"). Holmes also visits WW2-era Los Angeles to play a part in a horror/hard-boiled detective mash-up ("Red Sunset").
And it's a Holmes-homage tradition to have at least a couple of stories about cases briefly mentioned during Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories but never fully told. These references have always formed a sort of Black Casebook of Holmes adventures for later writers to imagine in their entirety. Here, "Merridew of Abominable Memory" and "The Steamship Friesland" develop these fleeting references of Doyle in unusual ways.
Finishing the anthology is Kim Newman's blackly comic, Holmes-and-Watson-less adventure of Professor Moriarty and his right-hand man Sebastian Moran. Newman riffs on H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, but probably not in the way one expects. In all, an enjoyable anthology. Recommended.
Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes (2011) edited by Charles Prepolec and J.R. Campbell, containing the following stories:
Sherlock Holmes and the Diving Bell by Simon Clark; The Greatest Mystery by Paul Kane; The Adventure of the Six Maledictions by Kim Newman; The Comfort of the Seine by Stephen Volk; The Adventure of Lucifer's Footprints by Christopher Fowler; The Deadly Sin of Sherlock Holmes by Tom English; The Color That Came To Chiswick by William Meikle; A Country Death by Simon Kurt Unsworth; From the Tree of Time by Fred Saberhagen (1982); The Executioner by Lawrence Connolly; Sherlock Holmes and the Great Game by Kevin Cockle; and The House of Blood by Tony Richards.
The third of EDGE Publishing's series of Weird Sherlock Holmes anthologies is solid and often deadly serious as these things go. The editors pay homage to one of Holmes's finest homagists, Fred Saberhagen, by reprinting a 1982 short story featuring Holmes and his distant ancestor and sometime-ally, Saberhagen's semi-heroic version of Dracula.
The rest of the anthology is new and, for the most part, ranges from enjoyable to excellent. Stand-outs include Stephen Volk's excellent chronicle of a young Sherlock Holmes in Paris, Simon Unsworth's horror story, and Kim Newman's comic adventure of Moriarty, Moran, and six dangerous supposedly magical items. Along the way, Holmes will also visit modern-day Las Vegas, hang out with Frankenstein's Creature, and battle Lovecraftian horror and Death itself. Recommended.
