Saturday, November 15, 2008

'A Study in Emerald' MP3 Download & 'Missing' Post

A recent post on yog-sothoth.com put me on to this one: Neil Gaiman's audio rendition of his Hugo Award winning short story 'A Study in Emerald' can be freely downloaded as an MP3 file for your listening pleasure here.

If you haven't encountered this tale before, you are in for a treat. This was the only worthy contribution to the otherwise execrable Shadows Over Baker Street anthology wherein(as the title suggests) Arthur Conan Doyle's famous consulting detective enters Wold Newton-like into a twisted relationship with the universe of Lovecraftian horror. Gaiman's tale is marked by its daring originality and its witty subversion/inversion of the basic assumptions of both the Lovecraftian and Holmesian milieux. A pdf of the story, produced as a 'facimile' of a late 19th Century news sheet can be found here.

Also a brief note on a recently 'missing' post (for those of you who caught it, the one entitled 'Some Heads Are More Haunted Than Others'). Said post has now been removed - I was moderating a comment when I realised that the posted version was a highly unsatisfactory rough draft and not the revised version (which, it seems, I have inadvertantly deleted).