Jonathan Currinn
A while ago, I received four Dark Tales graphic novels that I couldn’t wait to start to read. They were all classic stories re-told with beautiful imagery. I was in awe of the beautiful covers when they arrived, as you can tell by my first article, and I loved reading them from cover to cover. They were sent to me for review on Fuzzable, so here’s the second one, which is Dark Tales: The Hound Of The Baskervilles: A Graphic Novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and illustrated by Dave Shephard. I previously reviewed Dark Tales: Beauty And The Beast: A Modern Retelling by Jeanne-Marie Leprince and illustrated by Pete Katz here on Fuzzable.
This story wasn’t something I was familiar with myself, as I have never read a Sherlock Holmes story and I hadn’t even watched any of the films or TV series. So this was something completely new to me, and I think it was better off for me that way since I already thought some bits were missing in this, and if I had read the original story, I probably would’ve been more annoyed with this than I already was.
Now, I have to talk about this amazing cover, once again Canterbury Classics has given us a beautiful cover. This Dark Tales series is something I adore just because of the beautiful covers on the front. This is the sort of thing I would pick up if I saw it in a bookstore. They deserve to be seen by many. On the front, we see Sherlock Holmes in his famous trenchcoat and hat, while in the background we see a desert with a rock formation behind, where a hound is howling. Throughout, there’s a lot of characters, as first identified during the character page – I had to keep flipping back to this point to fully get my head around who was who.
This was a tough story, I always find graphic novels easy-readers and I was totally immersed in this storyline from the very start. Sherlock Holmes is approached by Sir Henry Baskerville for a problem like no other which takes him to the moors where he has to solve this deadly mystery before it ruins another person’s life.
We’re introduced to an array of characters, however there was one or two that didn’t appear in the character page. Not only that, but during some of the scenes, the characters’ clothes changed colour and style as if it was a mystery in itself.
The main thing that let this story down was the flow. I felt like big massive chunks were missing out here and there and I was wondering how the characters got from here to there in just a turn of the page. What this was lacking was story paragraphs, which we found in Dark Tales: Beauty And The Beast: A Modern Retelling by Jeanne-Marie Leprince and illustrated by Pete Katz. If the same idea had been included in this book, it would’ve worked perfectly.
Putting all that aside, I do like how this introduced Sherlock Holmes to me and would be a great way to get people to know about this character without delving into a lengthy book. “The Hound Of The Baskervilles” is such an iconic story and title, that this is certainly going to stay with me for the rest of my life.
Dark Tales: The Hound Of The Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and illustrated by Dave Shephard, was released on 22 March 2018. It is available to buy online and you can find out more information on the official Canterbury Classics website. We can’t recommend this enough.
Look out for our reviews of the three accompany Dark Tales novels that were also released at the same time, in the coming weeks. These Canterbury Classics are “Beauty And The Beast” by Jeanne-Marie Leprince and illustrated by Pete Katz, “The Call Of Cthulhu” by H. P. Lovecraft and illustrated by Dave Shephard, and “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Andersen and illustrated by Emilie Majarian.
