This holiday season I fancied taking a break from my usual activities (Feisty’s battery’s dead because of the harsh weather and buggered if I’m sleeping out in the bush in Arctic temperatures). Being bitterly cold outside, I decided to catch up on my reading and spend some time with the kids. I ordered a new Call of Cthulhu RPG supplement from Chaosium, Inc (Fragments of Fear) so we could all have some fun in Lovecraft’s world. It had been several years since last we played (we were in Croatia the last time).
Being a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes, I also bought a few crossover books to read alone of an evening. The story collection Shadows Over Baker Street was excellent, for the most part, although some sort of missed the point or showed an ignorance of Sherlockian protocol on the part of the author (never switch perspectives to show the antagonist’s POV). I also bought the self-published Epub Sherlock Holmes: The Shadow From Beyond, by Erik Branz, from Smashwords. While the story and descriptions were excellent, the author sadly confused modern terminology and concepts, and Americanisms, with the Victorian ambient (police cadets, flat mates and Fall as a season became tiresome). He also really should have had a grammar check done. My suspicion is that he initially wrote it as a screenplay and then padded it out into a novella as the text regularly switched between the present and past tenses.
Having run out of Holmesian crossovers, i then downloaded The Strange Cases of Rudolph Pearson from Chaosium, Inc.
Happy days, indeed!
Which reminds me, I really must check how VS is doing over at the Cult of Cthulhu….
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn
Carpathian Adventure 