Surprisingly, Arthur Conan Doyle never mentions a deerstalker hat hat for the summer in his Sherlock Holmes stories, though he describes Holmes s  sharp, eager face framed in his ear-flapped travelling cap in  Silver Blaze. It was the original illustrator, Sidney Paget, who added this detail to scenes of Holmes in the country (it would have been inappropriate to wear a deerstalker in town, where a top hat or homburg would have been more likely choices). The curved meerschaum pipe associated with Holmes was not in the Doyle stories, either: it was the choice of actor William Gillette and stuck with the character.

In The Hound of the Baskervilles , a romantic meeting between Sir Henry Baskerville and Miss Stapleton takes place despite Holmes s strict orders that Sir Henry never leave Watson s sight because of the curse of the  fiend dog. men's hat for summer Sir Henry insists he must go alone, saying to Watson, in dialogue that was invented for the TV version (with Jeremy Brett as Holmes and Edward Hardwicke as Watson):  You d make a very civil gooseberry, but no I m afraid I have to go alone. mens hat types Since the scene is recounted in a letter from Watson to Holmes in the original story, this word choice represents a charming piece of faux Victorian English.

Our new acquaintance very deliberately coiled up the tube of his hookah , and produced from behind a curtain a very long, befrogged top-coat with astrakhan collar and cuffs. This he buttoned tightly up, in spite of the extreme closeness of the night, and finished his attire by putting on a rabbit-skin cap with hanging lappets which covered the ears, so that no part of him was visible save ushanka hat his mobile and peaky face. "My health is somewhat fragile," he remarked, as he led the way down the passage. "I am compelled to be a valetudinarian."

}
i~
ek memorably compares the lamella to the face hugger in Ridley Scott s Alien , an indestructible creature which multiplies when it is cut into pieces, and whose extra flat body can suddenly fly up and envelop your face:  In it, he writes,  pure evil animality overlaps with machinic blind insistence. Here we might return to that classic ghost story I mentioned at the beginning of the essay:  Oh, Whistle and I ll Come to You, My Lad by M. R. James, a tale with a rather similar uncanny presence.

But the horror of the lamella extends beyond a purely sexualised reading of the story. It is truly disturbing, }
i~
ek might say, because it represents the intersection between the imaginary and the Real; it reveals the Real in its most terrifying dimension as the primordial abyss which dissolves all identities and swallows everything. This concept of the Real will be familiar to readers of weird fiction.

It is represented in white hat a range of literary guises from Poe s maelstrom to the horror at the end of Joseph Conrad s Heart of Darkness to Lovecraft s elder god Cthulhu, a creature who presents such a dangerous vision of the universe that he cannot be seen without causing madness: The Specialist s Hat terrifies us in much the same way that Lovecraft terrifies us: it hints at an encounter with something which is beyond the realm of our experience  death  and yet which is simultaneously so deeply embedded in our own nature that it is always already there .