Since SFFWorld has just posted an interview with
S. T. Joshi, one of the foremost scholars on the works of H. P. Lovecraft, here are a couple of suggestions that tie-in:
”HERBERT WEST, REANIMATOR” by H. P. Lovecraft (from
H. P. Lovecraft: The Fiction . Can be found at
The H. P. Lovecraft Archive, but note that Joshi updated the published texts of Lovecraft's stories based on Lovecraft's papers and other sources; this version likely pre-dates his update)
Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago, when we were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
– first paragraph
Welcome back to those thrilling days of yesteryear when pulp magazines cost $.25, embalming was optional and all scientists were mad,
mad I tell you!
Mad!
Into this heady mix stepped H. P. Lovecraft who, asked to provide a serial for the amateur publication,
Home Brew brought life to “Herbert West, Reanimator.”
The story ran one chapter per month for six consecutive months starting in February, 1922 and follows the exploits of the unnamed narrator and his associate, Herbert West. West is a genius who believes that the dead, if reached soon enough, can be brought back to life through the correct chemical process. Time and again West’s chemical cocktail almost works, but the specimen is never quite fresh enough and the formerly dead, brain deteriorated, awaken without their former character and personality, now violent and vicious; call them the granddads of the scientifically explained zombie. West destroys most of his unsuccessful experiments, but one escapes and is captured and shut in an asylum only to escape … with help. A later resurrection was quite fresh when injected and may or may not be dead, and West develops a dread of being followed.
Because this was a serial the beginning of each of the six chapters contains some summary of previous events. Lovecraft’s style is often a target for criticism, but these summaries are adroit, remaining brief and lending the completed story an interesting narrative rhythm, an almost poem-like movement of forward two steps, backward one step, forward. In his brief introduction, S. T. Joshi says that as it proceeds the story shifts toward self-parody, and indeed events become progressively more over-the-top as experiments fail, and when they begin to succeed, West’s other experiments become even more bizarre and his sanity more questionable.
The story is far from perfect. Lovecraft’s racism is evident in his description of some characters and as a story “Herbert West, Reanimator” is thin on development and repetitive. But if you can make allowances and enter in the right spirit it is gleefully hyperbolic and good fun for the days around Halloween.
For a slight story, “Herbert West, Reanimator” has had a fair amount of influence, its vision of the mad scientist not really fresh even at the time, but vigorously deployed and strong enough to engrave itself on later generations. For instance, in 1985 Stuart Gordon filmed the story as
Reanimator, which is gory, perverse, disgusting, perverse and gory, also very, very funny in a way that may make you uncomfortable that you are laughing at such things. Gordon took Lovecraft‘s basic plot, tweaked it, featured and expanded the over-the-top moments, added more violence and some sex, and produced one of the most audacious (though not for all tastes) horror movies of the 1980s.
A couple of years ago there was a discussion at SFFWorld about
noir versus Gothic. I balked when HPL was included as
noir because I see him firmly in the Gothic camp, aligned far more closely with the writing style, word choice, and sentence structure of Poe and Hawthorne than with his contemporaries, even his friend, Robert E. Howard. Still, as I read this it struck me as an exception. Lovecraft tied “Herbert West, Reanimator” to the landscape of
noir, back alleys and dark streets, and engaged with World War I among other aspects of then-contemporary life from which
noir emerged. Perhaps there was something in the air at the time: “Herbert West, Reanimator” in some ways reminds me less of Lovecraft’s other work than of the horror movies Warner Brothers produced in the early 1930s,
The Mystery of the Wax Museum and perhaps more so
Dr. X, which like Warner’s gangster movies tapped into the energy found in the inner-cities and those parts of cities where the poor lived and criminals did their business.
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.
—first paragraph
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.
[I'm having an issue pasting in links so I'll offer those up in a separate post.]
Thanks for the link. i found the story well worth the time it took me to read it.
