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To quite a few people, London's Highgate Cemetary is a space with bad juju, primarily because it is the burial site of Karl Marx, author of the Communist Manifesto. To just as many people, this fact makes Highgate sacred ground. In James Lovegrove's SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE HIGHGROVE HORRORS, there's nothing horrific about Highgate itself. It's rather how it is desecrated by a different German than Marx - a Dr. Strangelove-type evil scientist who calls up something very nasty indeed from someplace beyond Planet Earth and then, having to dispose of it, turns to Highgate. What happens next is part Holmes, part Frankenstein, and part Lovecraftian horror. For those who like this seemingly incongruous assortment of genre-fiction traditions, THE HIGHGATE HORRORS will prove a smart but never pretentious, entertaining romp.
I particularly appreciated the structure of this Lovegrove latest. It's a series of short, self-contained "adventures," much like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's canonical Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. However, like the periodical serial fiction that Doyle's short story format superseded, the HIGHGATE adventures lead into each other with stellar cliffhangers, creating an overarching connected tale.
Some usual suspects are back. Irene Adler, the "Canary of New Jersey," has something to do with supernatural chaos in London. Dr. Watson's marital history clutters the background of Sherlock Holmes's life while he emphatically excludes it from his mental attic. Real Victorian science and pseudoscience make appearances, inviting the reader to Google certain ideas and individuals and follow them down rabbit holes. Holmes and Watson's banter sound reasonably like their originals, as I've come to expect from Lovegrove.
And then there is the conceit that Holmes's investigation of the conventionally explicable is the tip of the iceberg, and his pursuit of mystical otherworldly invasion forces his real forte, as well as that of his brother Mycroft. According to Lovegrove, Watson proves willing to reveal that secret only on his deathbed, hence the Lovecraftian version of his adventures. This is a plausible contribution to the Sherlock Holmes tradition only because of Doyle's own disheartening (for me, anyway) fascination with occult nonsense, which he seemed to have considered a science that humanity was just on the verge of beginning to understand. And why not? Within two years of Doyle introducing Holmes to the world, London's Electric Avenue was first electrified. Doyle's career overlapped nearly exactly with Sigmund Freud's development of psychology -- and his insistence that this discipline was both a science and a kind of mysticism. A little later, relativity seemed to rewrite the rules of science. At the heart of Lovegrove's Holmes's investigation of ridiculous pulp fiction mysteries is his desire to understand the world, and, to quote him, to not just "see" but "observe." Lovegrove's capturing of this aspect of his character makes THE HIGHGATE HORRORS worth reading--even if you hate Lovecraft as intensely as Lovecraft hated nearly everyone different in any way from himself.
§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and co-edits Reviewing the Evidence.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, August 2024
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