Forgotten Lore Two: A Cry of Hounds
edited by
Danielle Ackley-McPhail
(NeoParadoxa, August 2024, pb, 299 pp.)
“The Night of the Howling Wind” by Ef Deal
“The Adventure of the Exploding Airship” by John L. French
“A Grecian Pawse” by Doc Coleman
“The Vampire of Rannoch Moor” by David Lee Summers
“Amber Waves of Bane” by Dana Fraedrich
“Weighed and Measured” by Bill Bodden
“Progenitor” by Keith R. A. DeCandido
“Ember Eyes” by Jessica Lucci
“The Houndstooth Affair” by Aaron Rosenberg
“A Glimpse of Death” by James Chambers
“They Who Have Lost Their Way” by Danielle Ackley-McPhail
“Sherlock Holmes and the Stonyhurst Terror” by Christopher D. Abbott
Reviewed by Victoria Silverwolf
An excerpt from Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, featuring Sherlock Holmes, serves as the introduction to this anthology of a dozen new stories. Drawing inspiration from this famous work, the authors offer tales involving canines of various sorts, usually supernatural. The stories generally take place in fantasy, steampunk, or alternate history versions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
“The Night of the Howling Wind” by Ef Deal begins with the discovery of a bloody set of clothing suggesting a murder without a corpse. A woman claiming to be hunting a werewolf becomes involved. Complicating matters is the arrival of a gigantic storm.
The disparate elements of this work, which combines a murder mystery with dark fantasy and disaster fiction, do not always work together gracefully. The description of the destructive nature of the storm is the most effective part of the narrative.
Set in a steampunk version of Victorian England, “The Adventure of the Exploding Airship” by John L. French features a police detective and his loyal hound. They investigate the destruction of an experimental automated airship and the death of the only person aboard the vessel. The case leads to a tangled web of deception and murder.
Steampunk technology is the only speculative element in what is otherwise crime fiction. Unlike other stories in the anthology, the dog is an ordinary canine and not a supernatural creature. Readers of police procedurals will best appreciate this work. Some may enjoy the narrator’s tongue-in-cheek style, others may find it a bit too flip for a serious plot.
In “A Grecian Pawse” by Doc Coleman, a group of unusual people encounter a friendly three-headed dog on a Greek island. Their attempt to return it to its rightful owner is complicated by the fact that the local inhabitants consider it to be the monstrous canine Cerberus from ancient mythology.
As one can tell from the punning title, this is a whimsical tale. The explanation for the existence of the dog, involving a head that can travel in time, is as wacky and arbitrary as the fact that one of the characters has four arms. The intent appears to be comic, but nothing particularly funny happens.
The protagonist of “The Vampire of Rannoch Moor” by David Lee Summers is a psychic who visits an old friend in Scotland. She investigates the disappearance of four men and reports of a gigantic green hound said to steal the souls of the living. The situation involves a mysterious lord and his weird invention.
The combination of traditional folklore and mad science is an unusual one, even if the two varieties of speculative fiction do not always blend smoothly. The alleged vampirism of the lord, which gives the story its title, plays very little part in the plot, and could be eliminated easily.
“Amber Waves of Bane” by Dana Fraedrich takes place in a fantasy version of the Old West. The main character is a seer who can perceive the world of the supernatural, unseen by people lacking her gift. She investigates the mysterious illnesses of a young man and his dog, which is suspected to be the result of black magic. The case involves a god of death, his hound, and a scheming member of the sick man’s family.
As in previous stories in the volume, this tale combines multiple genres. In general, the author mixes mythic fantasy, Western fiction, and mystery in an effective manner. However, some readers may find the strong contrast between epic folklore and family scandal disconcerting.
The main character in “Weighed and Measured” by Bill Bodden possessed an ancient Egyptian scroll that allowed him to revive a mummy and have it do his bidding, using the creature to destroy his enemies. When the magic scroll is destroyed, he sets out to find another, with unexpected results.
The story’s structure is unusual, beginning in first person and then shifting to third person. The initial section relates the narrator’s former crimes, while the later portion tells of his fate in the desert. This technique adds little to what is a fairly predictable plot.
“Progenitor” by Keith R. A. DeCandido features Professor Challenger, a character created by Arthur Conan Doyle in works such as The Lost World (1912). In this tale, set not long after the Great War, he sets out after a pair of colleagues who claim to have discovered the ancient ancestor of a particular breed of Mongolian hound. The quest leads to a hidden civilization, conflict with Chinese soldiers, and a gigantic dog.
The secret civilization possesses advanced technology that adds the feeling of steampunk to the narrative. This aspect of the story seems out of place in a pastiche of Doyle’s fantasy fiction. Fans of Professor Challenger are likely to find this new adventure satisfying, despite this incongruity.
The narrator of “Ember Eyes” by Jessica Lucci has visions of a shadowy figure when she is a child in a steampunk version of Victorian England. She grows up to invent a clean source of energy. A rival attempts to steal the technology, leading to an encounter with a gigantic supernatural hound.
The presence of the hound, which sometimes appears as a small puppy, remains unexplained, although it apparently has something to do with the woman’s experience as a girl. The fact that the device she creates resembles an umbrella is likely to strike the reader as silly in an otherwise serious story.
“The Houndstooth Affair” by Aaron Rosenberg takes place in a steampunk version of nineteenth century New York City. A police detective and his rookie assistant investigate the murder of a museum guard and the theft of a clockwork dog. The solution to the mystery depends on several mistakes made by the criminal.
As with the story by French, this is a straightforward murder mystery that happens to have a steampunk background that is mostly irrelevant to the plot. The detective makes some clever deductions, but I failed to understand how he tracked down the murderer. Readers of crime fiction may be able to forgive this ambiguity and enjoy the narrator’s slangy, informal style.
“A Glimpse of Death” by James Chambers has a similar setting, but one in which magic plays an important part. Three young assistants of a wealthy man, whom he hires to investigate strange happenings, witness a supernatural hound that announces impending death. Two of them actually see the creature, which dooms them to die unless the curse can be lifted. The hound was used by an evil sorcerer to kill an ambassador. The rich man obtains the aid of a witch in his quest to save the lives of the young men.
The sorcerer is a figure of pure evil, and is much less of a fully developed character than the protagonists. Unless I missed something, I don’t think there was even a motive for his murder of the ambassador. The plot depends on the sorcerer having an extreme fear of technology, which seems overly convenient.
In “They Who Have Lost Their Way” by editor Danielle Ackley-McPhail, a young woman in the service of a goddess of death discovers that something is devouring the spirit dogs that lead the deceased to the land of the dead. She uses a substance that brings her to the brink of death in order to confront the being, who threatens to destroy the souls of the dead.
The author makes use of ancient Aztec myth as well as the concepts from a modern Mexican religious movement that honors Santa Muerte, a benign female incarnation of death. This adds freshness to an anthology full of tales based on European legends. The story has a great deal of emotional power, due to the fact that the protagonist seeks to protect the souls of her dead relatives.
“Sherlock Holmes and the Stonyhurst Terror” by Christopher D. Abbott ends the volume where it began, with the Great Detective and a seemingly spectral hound. Doctor Watson and a colleague witness the monstrous beast, as they become involved in the mystery of recently buried bodies being removed from a cemetery. This seems to be the work of the supernatural hound, but Holmes seeks a rational explanation.
This is a reasonably effective pastiche of Doyle, although some may find it a bit too derivative of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Although mostly a mainstream mystery, there are small hints that something truly supernatural is involved, thus justifying its inclusion in the anthology.
Overall, the anthology provides a reasonable variety of stories despite having a theme that would seem limiting. The tales take place in many different places on Earth, which serves as a relief from the usual British and American backgrounds of steampunk fiction. On the other hand, the volume might have too many gigantic supernatural hounds to be enjoyed in one sitting.
Victoria Silverwolf doesn’t live with a dog, just cats.