Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

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Welcome to Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes, the third in our series of anthologies to pitch Sherlock Holmes into weird and supernatural stories. Yes, that’s right; third. The book you now hold in your hands follows Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes (2008 EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing) and Gaslight Grotesque: Nightmare Tales of Sherlock Holmes (2009 EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing). Let me tell you a little story about how we got to this point….

It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play … okay, maybe not, but time flies when you’re having fun, and I’ve definitely been having fun with Sherlock Holmes over the last few years. It was 2006 when my co-editor Jeff Campbell and I first set out to plunge that most rational of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, into the murky realms of supernatural, or weird fiction. At that point it had been three years since we had edited our small press anthologies of traditional Sherlock Holmes pastiche — Curious Incidents: Volumes 1 & 2 — and we were looking to do something else, something new, something different, maybe something a bit ‘out there’ with the character. Most of all we wanted to do something that would be fun — fun for us to put together, but more importantly, fun for our readers. It set me to thinking about exactly which Sherlock Holmes stories, by authors other than Arthur Conan Doyle, had given me the most pleasure over the years. Which were the most memorable or had left some strong impression on me? Which ones made me smile when I first read them? Given my lifelong enthusiasm for horror fiction, comic books and pulp tales, it should come as no surprise that my list was populated with books and stories that referenced these interests.

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