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larsvermeulen 's review for:
The Cthulhu Casebooks - Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows
by James Lovegrove
(...) "I have buried the truth, but its grave has been unquiet and disturbances from it have since troubled me in the night." (Foreword by Dr. John Watson, MD, p.12)
"The pillar towered on the horizon. (...) A hulking, crouching thing with the body of a man, the wings of a bat and a head like a squid" (p. 189)
(...) "extensive carvings. These, of remarkable quality and intricacy, depicted the same bat-winged creature that surmounted the pillar, lording it over men with the heads of lizards, who cowered cravenly before it. Elsewhere the lizard-headed men were seen slaughtering normal human beings, slitting their throats and cutting out their hearts and entrails with their clawed hands. In several of the images, the eviscerated innards were offered up to the bat-winged thing on dishes, as food." (p. 190)
"The shadows, however, were upon us. Their black tendrils were stroking the sides of the cab acquisitively and creeping up around Holmes's legs and mine. I did not want to look directly into their darkness, yet somehow I was unable to help myself. My eye was drawn irresistibly to a shape that was visible in their depths. Faintly, as though a fathom of brackish water, something could be discerned - something multifarious and kaleidoscopic, something awful. It had no fixed form. It churned and billowed like smoke. Yet it was solid, too: glossy, fleshy. It seemed to remake itself with each passing second, rippling, constantly evolving. Eyes. It had eyes. Dozens of them. They blinked and revolved and stared. They were watching me. They could see me. They hungered for me. They ached to devour me." (p. 243)
""You call them fodder, I call them human beings."
"As you wish. Those human beings, with the gift of their life force, have been sustaining a certain party whose influence I have been cultivating for some while. The monthly supply of nourishment, conveyed to him via the shadows, has been sating his appetite, and currying me his favour."
"And that party would be...?"
"I cannot mention his name."
"Cthulhu?"
"Not he. That would be too brazen by far, even for me. I may be ambitious, Mr Holmes, but I am not mad."" (p. 288)
"They are gods, but not the kind that the vast majority of people worship nowadays. They do not love us. Neither, for that matter, do they hate us. They use us from time to time, as a beekeeper uses his bees; our souls are like honey to them, a side-product of our lives (...)" (p. 294)
(...) "a large, thick book. It was the size of two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica combined, and was bound in leather so black it seemed not to reflect light, but rather to absorb it. The page edges were stained to match the binding, so that the book, taken as a whole, was a rectangular cuboid of perfect darkness, like a chunk of solid void, a three-dimensional absence in space." (p. 385)
""You believe the danger is not yet past?" I said.
"From what I know, it will never be past, not while the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods live. They will always be pursuing their sinister agendas, whether that means seeking the total enslavement of mankind or merely wreaking havoc with the minds and souls of individual mortals. Whatever lusts they wish to slake or cruelties they wish to inflict, they will, with scant regard for the consequences. We, to these gods, are little better than flies." (p. 437)
"The pillar towered on the horizon. (...) A hulking, crouching thing with the body of a man, the wings of a bat and a head like a squid" (p. 189)
(...) "extensive carvings. These, of remarkable quality and intricacy, depicted the same bat-winged creature that surmounted the pillar, lording it over men with the heads of lizards, who cowered cravenly before it. Elsewhere the lizard-headed men were seen slaughtering normal human beings, slitting their throats and cutting out their hearts and entrails with their clawed hands. In several of the images, the eviscerated innards were offered up to the bat-winged thing on dishes, as food." (p. 190)
"The shadows, however, were upon us. Their black tendrils were stroking the sides of the cab acquisitively and creeping up around Holmes's legs and mine. I did not want to look directly into their darkness, yet somehow I was unable to help myself. My eye was drawn irresistibly to a shape that was visible in their depths. Faintly, as though a fathom of brackish water, something could be discerned - something multifarious and kaleidoscopic, something awful. It had no fixed form. It churned and billowed like smoke. Yet it was solid, too: glossy, fleshy. It seemed to remake itself with each passing second, rippling, constantly evolving. Eyes. It had eyes. Dozens of them. They blinked and revolved and stared. They were watching me. They could see me. They hungered for me. They ached to devour me." (p. 243)
""You call them fodder, I call them human beings."
"As you wish. Those human beings, with the gift of their life force, have been sustaining a certain party whose influence I have been cultivating for some while. The monthly supply of nourishment, conveyed to him via the shadows, has been sating his appetite, and currying me his favour."
"And that party would be...?"
"I cannot mention his name."
"Cthulhu?"
"Not he. That would be too brazen by far, even for me. I may be ambitious, Mr Holmes, but I am not mad."" (p. 288)
"They are gods, but not the kind that the vast majority of people worship nowadays. They do not love us. Neither, for that matter, do they hate us. They use us from time to time, as a beekeeper uses his bees; our souls are like honey to them, a side-product of our lives (...)" (p. 294)
(...) "a large, thick book. It was the size of two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica combined, and was bound in leather so black it seemed not to reflect light, but rather to absorb it. The page edges were stained to match the binding, so that the book, taken as a whole, was a rectangular cuboid of perfect darkness, like a chunk of solid void, a three-dimensional absence in space." (p. 385)
""You believe the danger is not yet past?" I said.
"From what I know, it will never be past, not while the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods live. They will always be pursuing their sinister agendas, whether that means seeking the total enslavement of mankind or merely wreaking havoc with the minds and souls of individual mortals. Whatever lusts they wish to slake or cruelties they wish to inflict, they will, with scant regard for the consequences. We, to these gods, are little better than flies." (p. 437)