Author Mark Frost
I’ve been trying to think of how to go about writing this post. I discovered this book many years ago and read it several times, then put it down for a few years and picked it up again last month.
The List of 7 is a fictional account of how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle met the man about whom he based the Sherlock Holmes stories. According to the short biography of Doyle in the front of The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I, Doyle based Holmes on a professor he had in college. But author Mark Frost tells us a different story in The List of 7.
Late in his life, Doyle began speaking of his belief in spiritualism — the idea that the spirit lives on after it leaves the body. 7 focuses heavily on this aspect of Doyle’s beliefs.
The book begins with young Dr. Doyle receiving an urgent request to attend a seance one evening in order to ascertain whether the medium is the real thing. What he doesn’t know is that the invite is in response to a book he wrote and shopped to publishers. The book was a work of fiction, but touched on a subject close to home for a group of seven people with very bad intentions: bringing “the devil” (or “the dweller on the threshold”) across the spiritual divide and into an earthly body.
A man named Jack Sparks rescues Doyle that night and the two embark on an adventure to both elude the Seven and also to stop them from achieving their objective.
The writing is amazing. Unfortunately, The List of 7 was not a runaway hit and is out of print, along with its sequal, The 6 Messiahs. Frost was co-creator of the infamous Twin Peaks series. For good measure, Frost throws in an appearance by Bram Stoker as a member of an acting troupe, which was a really neat reference.
Reichenbach Falls, Switzerland
The entire novel is a supernatural mystery, Sherlock Holmes style. I loved it the last time I read it as much as the first. In contrast to the Sherlock Holmes movie in theaters now, which I reviewed yesterday, it’s refreshing. It’s a shame no filmmaker picked up 7 instead.
I won’t tell you the twist at the end. I happen to love spoilers myself, but many others don’t. I will give you all a hint, though: The novel ends with Doyle and his family visiting Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland in 1889, where they meet a very “special” baby.
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