I got <The Hound of the Baskervilles: A Graphic Novel>
for Christmas this year and as soon as I saw it, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. But I waited until February to crack it. It wasn’t a book I wanted to read a page at a time, but all at once while under a blanket with a cup of tea and, maybe, as the winter afternoon darkened into evening, a glass of whiskey with ice. It’s the kind of book that’s just nice to hold in your hands, a paperback with nice stiff, smooth paper and colorful pictures and a glossy inset image of Sherlock Holmes on the cover that’s fun to run your finger over. Of course, there’s the most important thing, the prospect of an exciting story … My experience with this little treasure did not disappoint. Maybe, in the illustrations, illustrator Dave Shephard’s Sherlock Holmes was a little too debonair and ordinary-looking, a little too chisel-faced Cary Grant, for my taste—for some reason, I want him to look a little weirder—but other than that, the illustrations are wonderful, full of energy and darkness, and text is used to great effect. The great sweeping strokes used to paint the wild moor are especially nice, and a similar technique—half- or whole-page depictions with just dots of text—used to bring alive the cavernous secrets of Baskerville Hall were equally effective, and made me desperate to pass a night in a creaky old creepy English house in the country. Hot chocolate would also be an appropriate accompaniment to this treat of a book.