GLR January-February 2023

quickly move into unfamiliar territory, both for the reader and for Watson. Dr. Mortimer claims that Charles Baskerville was buggered to death, and the locals believe the perpetrator was a demonic dog that haunts the Baskerville clan. James Baskerville suffers from “hysteria masculina,” a condition whose treatment involves frequent sessions with a phallic mannequin that might have a mind of its own. And when Wat son and handsome manservant Barrymore explore the tunnels below Baskerville Hall, they find themselves making love un controllably in an eerie cavern, watched by small mutant al bino animals that have crawled from a deep crevice that might lead to Hell. Faced with such strange situations, Watson wonders if he’s hallucinating from all the laudanum he’s been taking. Sher lock Holmes has recently ended their long but secret love af fair, and the liquid opioid is the only thing that helps Watson’s broken heart. The reader may also think they’re hallucinating, as the story becomes increasingly surreal. The corridors of Baskerville Hall seem to rearrange themselves, and the manor contains a doorway that may open into the distant past. A neighboring manor, Laughter Hall, contains a funhouse ride complete with papier mâché dinosaurs and a diorama of a fu turistic Dartmoor city. Its owner, the eccentric Lord V, meets a particularly gruesome fate involving a telescope. As Watson tries to solve the deepening mystery, he also encounters tenta cled monsters, murderous giants, Druidic sex rites, and the tit ular hound itself. It’s a lot to pack into such a short novel, but McOmber keeps the focus on the hapless Dr. Watson. He’s middle-aged, losing his looks, suddenly alone, and the mystery at Baskerville Hall is possibly beyond his powers to solve. Can he transform himself from Holmes’ sidekick into a detective in his own right? Possi bly, but as he comes to grasp the situation at Baskerville Hall, his mission changes from solving the mystery to saving himself and the other gay men around him. Watson may not be as observant or intelligent as Sherlock Holmes, but in McOmber’s telling he has the bigger heart. Hound of the Baskervilles has some similarities to McOmber’s 2020 novel Jesus and John , in which the Apostle John and a newly resurrected Jesus try to escape from a labyrinthine villa in ancient Rome. Both novels feature heart broken gay male protagonists wandering through surreal land scapes, but McOmber grounds Hound ’s weirdness in some vividly written sex scenes and plenty of genre thrills. The novel actually spans several genres, including mystery, super natural horror, Lovecraftian weird tale, and queer romance, but McOmber grapples with bigger themes like the limits of rationality and the nature of time. His clean, elegant prose adds a dash of literary fiction to the mix. There are also some sur prisingly humorous sections, including one in which several characters try to determine the identity of a murder victim whose face has been completely obliterated by a large rock. It’s a gruesome scene but leavened with bitchy dialogue. I’m not quite sure how McOmber manages to makes all these dis parate threads cohere in so few pages, but, as Dr. Watson learns, some mysteries are not meant to be solved but instead just experienced. ____________________________________________________ Peter Muise writes about New England folklore and legends. 46

Goodbye to All That

D ALE B OYER

OTHER NAMES FOR LOVE: A Novel by Taymour Soomro Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 256 pages. $26. O N FIRST IMPRESSION, Other Names for Love ap pears to be yet another novel in which a young gay boy—in this case, a British Pakistani one—grows up misunderstood and has a difficult relationship with his old school father. And yet, this impression rapidly shifts when, in chapter two, the novel begins to tell things from the father’s point of view. Right away the novel reveals itself to be far more interesting than expected. When the novel opens, Fahad is being dragged back to the Pakistani village where his father, Rafik, grew up and holds a position of power in the government. This desire to have Fahad spend a summer in the village is an attempt by his father to “toughen him up.” To Fahad, who has spent a great deal of time in London, his father is “a cannonball, an avalanche, something giant crashing through the jungle,” and the village is the most backwater of places. Even Karachi would be preferable, he thinks. Yet there seems to be no way of escaping his father, whose voice and influence seep through even the walls of the train they’re journeying on together. To Rafik, as we begin to see in chapter two, his son seems disconnected from everything that made Rafik who he is—in essence, everything to do with Pakistan itself. Though Rafik is undeniably a force of nature—at times brutally so, especially to the servants and locals of the village—he emerges as a prod uct of his times, someone who survived by becoming hard, and he doesn’t want to see his son trampled by the world around him. This is not to minimize his ultimate narcissism; and yet, cu riously—perhaps because he is such a larger-than-life figure, and so vividly portrayed—he grows on us by-and-by, almost to the point of upstaging our sympathies for Fahad. On the other hand, over the course of the novel Fahad is shown to be someone who has had a hard time seeing himself clearly. With one foot in Pakistan and another in London, he’s also dealing with a newly emergent sexuality that separates him from the surrounding community—not only in Pakistan, but also in London. During his summer in the village, he meets a local boy, Ali, and the sexual encounter they share will rock Fahad’s world from that point forward. His fears, however, may be more imagined than real. In the end his mother acknowledges his sexuality with the words: “You bring who you want. If you have a friend, someone you live with, bring him. What do we care? You think it is us, looking over your shoulder, that it is us shaking our heads at the things you do.” The father could easily have come off as a caricature or even a monster. The fact that Rafik emerges as a sympathetic char acter is a testament to Soomro’s skill as a writer. Proceeding in terse, colorful, fragmentary bursts, Soomro’s prose, especially

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