A Study in Brimstone

This reminded me a bit of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies but with Sherlock Holmes instead. Sherlock Holmes rewritten with a supernatural twist, and with a personality shift in several of the major characters. I'd give this a 3 stars because while it was entertaining while it lasted, I felt that more could've been done to really hook the readers into the “new” twists of the overarching plot. I somewhat enjoyed myself whenever I had the book open, but I never really felt a push to go back to it when I was on a break, which is why I took much longer than usual finishing it.

I wasn't too mad at the personality changes of our main characters, but I think a lot of the original charisma was, perhaps deliberately, lost in translation and there wasn't enough new interesting-ness to make up for it. Instead of the bungling sidekick that Dr Watson usually is, he's now actually astute and is the one making the deductions attributed to Holmes in the original stories. He's supposed to be a reader self-insert in being the only one in the main cast who is new to the whole supernatural thing and trying to figure things out as he goes along. Given that he is supposed to be pretty smart now, it seems contradictory when he completely makes some pretty big mistakes which he's also constantly pointing out to us - Beginning the book with saying that he had accidentally caused the end of the world felt like it was setting Dr Watson up to be in that “bungling sidekick” stereotype, so I was a little surprised when he started solving cases with more gusto than Holmes was. Then we have, at the end of the Charles Augustus Milverton story, him admitting again in hindsight about the oversight he made. - so this constant flipping between smart and not-so-smart was pretty confusing to me.

Holmes probably had the biggest personality flip of the lot. While I think the original Holmes has become such an enduring figure in popular imagination because of his sardonic razor-sharp wit and his almost sociopathic aversion to societal norms in favour of his intellectual pursuits, the Holmes we have in this one is emphatically neither of those things. From the get-go, we see that he is very much not in the line of deductions and crime-solving when Watson is the one puncturing holes in his weak lines of logic. At first I had thought that perhaps it was because in this one he was going to actually have some kind of magic powers up his sleeve to explain his deductions but that didn't seem to be the case either. In fact, Holmes in this one reminded me a bit more of Bertie Wooster from the P. G. Wodehouse stories - indolent, irrelevant, even though ultimately well-meaning. His one power that floats him through this book is his ability to somehow mysteriously vanquish demons in other realms by ingesting them, or something. I felt like this ability wasn't well explained enough in the book to make me feel like I wanted to know more about it.

Overall, I had a decently enjoyable time with this book. It had a number of moments in it with some great humour but for a first book in a series (and I do think that there is an overarching plot behind this, even though it is presented in the chronology of the Sherlock Holmes short stories), more could have been done to show the magic system and the supernatural realms that's supposed to be the differentiating factor of this retelling.