Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows (The Cthulhu Casebooks, #1)

by James Lovegrove

I have constructed a shell of artifice around a dark, rotten kernel so as to protect civilisation from certain facts that would throw its cosy self-assurance into drastic and lasting disarray.

It is as though some people’s lives are incomplete without a dash of fantasy, and the mania for such woolly-headed nonsense is fuelled by papers like the one you’re holding, which see their circulation increase the more credence and column inches they give to it.

It's the Fox News supervilain origin story.

“Cynicism is simply realism with a veneer of irony.”

You British have built an empire on empiricism. You pay lip service to religion and the mysteries of the divine, but it is cold, hard fact that you really worship.