Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > A Study in Emerald

This is the graphic novel version of Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald," which won the Hugo Award for short stories in 2004. It's a brilliant mash-up of the Sherlock Holmes universe and H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, a weird but wonderful fantasy variation on a Sherlock Holmes mystery.

So I'm normally not a graphic novel kind of person - I like my reading straight-up, the traditional way, not in audio or graphic novel version - but when I saw this book sitting on the library shelf staring at me I couldn't resist picking it up, since the original "Study in Emerald" is one of my favorite Gaiman short stories. (Really, it is brilliant.)

It's Victorian days in England Albion, and a doctor, wounded in the Afghanistan war (in this case, by a monstrous being), moves in with a new roommate. Names are never mentioned, but the new roommate is a consulting detective with a deep knowledge of obscure facts. Oh, and he lives on Baker Street. Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard comes to beg the detective's help in solving a mystery: an alien noble from Germany has been murdered, emerald blood scattered everywhere. All the nobility and leaders of nations in this world are Lovecraftian aliens, owing to their conquest of the world 700 years earlier. But the thing is, most people heartily approve of government-by-alien-monsters, despite some ... drawbacks. So the detective and the good doctor set off to hunt down the murderers.

I still like the original written version of this story better, but this graphic novel does have about 80-90% of the original version's text (I was doing a side-by-side comparison for most of the novel). The illustrations are appropriately creepy, especially Queen Victoria and her magic tentacles and human mask. :) (view spoiler)[Prince Albert is human, and I just don't even want to think about the human/monster interbreeding going on in this world. (hide spoiler)]

Once you read this, I highly recommend Wikipedia's spoiler-filled page about this book, which includes discussion of the many hints and Easter eggs that Gaiman slipped into this story. Here's a link to the Wikipedia article. The "advertisements" are to die for.