Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Hound of the Baskervilles

This week's review:  Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, which you can also read online here, if you do not value your eye-sight.

Sherlock Holmes: The Hound of the Baskervilles 

I found myself weary and yet wakeful, tossing restlessly from side to side, seeking for the sleep which would not come. Far away a chiming clock struck out the quarters of the hours, but otherwise a deathly silence lay upon the old house. And then suddenly, in the very dead of the night, there came a sound to my ears, clear, resonant, and unmistakable. It was the sob of a woman, the muffled, strangling gasp of one who is torn by an uncontrollable sorrow. I sat up in bed and listened intently. The noise could not have been far away and was certainly in the house. For half an hour I waited with every nerve on the alert, but there came no other sound save the chiming clock and the rustle of the ivy on the wall... 


The story begins at Sherlock Holmes' place, where he's joined by his friend Dr. Watson.  The two are naturally in the middle of investigating a stranger's walking stick, accidentally left at Holmes' house.  The stick, it turns out, belongs to a Dr. Mortimer, who is asking the two for help with a manuscript documenting the Curse of the Baskervilles.  And so it begins, in a 19th-century smoke-filled room, as Sherlock meditates on the strange, morbid occurrences that have plagued the Baskerville family for generations.  And you, reader, if I still have your attention, will soon become another detective, unlocking the mysterious past of these sad characters trapped in the gloom of the moor.

At every turn, Baskerville gave an exclamation of delight, looking eagerly about him and asking countless questions.  To his eyes all seemed beautiful,  but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year.  Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed.  The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation - sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.

Needless to say, this story of Mr. Baskerville's eerie family legacy is a classic for a reason.  I liked it just as I had expected to like it, knowing I'm not so crazy about detective novels, and yet that I love a good gothic atmosphere and interesting tale of death, evil and melancholy.  I just think that Poe is more in my line of writing, since he's not as hung up on whodunnit, rather on what it was like to ...dunnit.  And with that, I leave you to your devices, partly because I have a whole bag of Easter Rolos here that needs eating.  And partly because this is the third darn time I tried to get this post out.  Next time we'll change up the genre with a review of Jennifer Donnelly's historical drama called The Tea Rose.

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