Beautiful Monsters
Bill Walker & Brian Anthony - Illustrated by Rick Geary
A cursed book—and the odyssey to destroy it once and for all.
London,1916, an ailing Sherlock Holmes, attended by his old friend and biographer John Watson, relays one final, remarkable story—that of Holmes’s own mentor.
Professor Beadle, laureate at Cambridge University with degrees in biology, anthropology, and sociology, is widely respected by faculty and students alike. But the Professor’s obsession with his bizarre theories about insect-men and the book he writes—Beautiful Monsters—costs the Professor his position at the University, his wife, and his young daughter.
And then to make matters worse, a former student belatedly reveals the terrible truth to the Professor: that the empirical evidence upon which the book was based was fake—a practical joke!
Thus begins a forty-year odyssey in which Professor Beadle, aided and abetted by his former student, searches the world for the thousand printed copies of his book—buying, begging, and sometimes stealing them, with the goal of eventually destroying every last copy.
Can the Professor save his reputation, or will he destroy himself in the process?