The Countdown to Halloween continues. This time Randy M. looks at Reanimators by Pete Rawlik.
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REANIMATORS by Pete Rawlik (Nightshade Books, 2013)
For the record, my name is Stuart Asa Hartwell. I reside and work at Number Twenty-Nine Crane Street. The expansive three-story house with its basement and sub-basement has served the Hartwell family as both home and storefront for generations, though not always in a medical capacity. My father, like my grandfather and his father before him, were butchers and it was through his hard work that I was able to attend nearby Miskatonic University from which I obtained a degree in medicine and became a doctor. Given the heinous acts of which I am accused, it is perhaps better that my parents were lost in the summer of 1905, victims of the madness and typhoid fever that had enveloped Arkham. Shortly before that dreaded year my sister married a man named Kramer and moved to Boston. I have not heard from her or her family in more than fifteen years. Once again, perhaps it is better this way.
Once again, welcome back to those thrilling days of yesteryear when pulp-Frankensteins, scientific necromancers, raised hell – not to mention, the dead – about once a month!
Except this time, the writer is a current novelist, Pete Rawlik, using “Herbert West, Reanimator” as his entry into the New England of H. P. Lovecraft, weaving Dr. Hartwell through the events of several Lovecraft stories as well as real world events between 1905 and 1929 like the sinking of the Titanic, World War I, and the Spanish Influenza.
Dr. Hartwell witnesses the devastation caused by the recklessness of Dr. Herbert West and his associate, whom Rawlik names Dr. Daniel Crane, a recklessness that costs Hartwell his parents. He vows revenge.
Over the course of the novel Dr. Hartwell establishes his practice in his parent’s house, and builds a secret laboratory in his sub-basement, meanwhile tracking the progress of West and Crane, sabotaging them when possible, stealing their useful ideas, occasionally righting their mistakes and progressing faster at reanimation while leaving behind much the same trail of devastation. In the process, Hartwell intersects with Lovecraft’s “Cool Air”, “The Dunwich Horror”, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and “The Shadow Out of Time,” among others, and meets such fictional characters as Nick Charles (from The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett) and Charlie Chan (from novels by Earl Derr Bigger).
Rawlik establishes an old fashioned narrative feel early on, mainly by eschewing dialog, while maintaining the voice of an educated man from the early years of the 20th century. For me, this narrative strategy produces a narrator who is too even-keeled, his vengefulness too rational. Hartwell is an intelligent man who doesn’t share Herbert West’s monomania and only occasionally does the desperation he should feel in his circumstances add drive to the story, for example when Rawlik builds toward a fine sequence set on the front in World War I, fully conveying the horror of war as well as the horror of what West and Hartwell are striving to achieve. For most of the novel, though, I find Hartwell a rather bland ghoul.
While not a bad read if you have patience, I think Reanimators would appeal most to HPL fans who want Lovecraft-like incidents blended into a longer form.
A sequel, The Weird Company was released in October 2014.
