It’s not too often that my older brother asks me for tips on good books, though I’m not sure why. I think we’ve got similar tastes, and we tend to be two of the more faithful readers in our Siblings’ Book Club. When he asked me for old-school sci-fi books or similar, I sent him to H.P. Lovecraft to see if that might be a good fit. I don’t even know what book of Lovecraft’s he ended up reading! Knowing I shouldn’t make blind recommendations, though, I figured I should try one on for size too. This was the first that became available.
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Horror stories definitely aren’t my genre, especially those about zombies. I’ve never been tempted by Frankenstein (or his Bride), and Edgar Allen Poe was a mere curiosity for me in high school. The closest I’ve ever come to enjoying horror is Stephen King’s The Shining. Still, I made it through this story because I was curious how a hundred-year-old freak-tale would hold up. It was all right.
Summary of Herbert West: Reanimator
The story was originally a magazine serial, and you wouldn’t need research to figure that out. Each part re-introduces the story of Herbert West up to that point, as if readers needed a refresher. Read all together as a book, it’s repetitive. The following offers a terribly brief summary of each of the book’s 6 parts.
Part 1: “From the Dark” – The narrator describes how he first met West who’s obsessed with inventing a serum that would help revive the dead. They practice on a drowning victim with little apparent success. Herbert West comments at one point his own personal worldview and reasons for inventing: “Life is a chemical….the soul is a myth.”
Part 2: “The Plague Daemon” – When a Dean of their school dies, the men seek to reanimate the body. This time the reanimation works, but not in the way they’d intended. The body is now a monster, a zombie (though I don’t think the word existed back then). It escapes and goes on a murdering spree before being arrested and held in an insane asylum for 16 years.
Part 3: “Six Shots by Moonlight” – The men later help arrange for the disposal of a black boxer killed in an illegal back-alley match. Again, the serum only creates a monster which, though buried, escapes and murders a child.
Part 4: “The Scream of the Dead” – Time progresses and the men have their own practice now. This may be their closest bout with success, but the narrator speculates how West could have found such a perfectly preserved body. West claims that he injected a preservative into the salesman’s corpse just after he unexpectedly died of a heart attack in their office. The body, reanimated almost to humanity, claims otherwise screaming out before dying once more that West had in fact murdered him.
Part 5: “The Horror from the Shadows” – The men serve behind the front lines of Flanders in The Great War, West being joyfully surrounded by death and body parts. West finds new hope in reanimating only portions of the body, and when he preserves the headless body of a pilot, he recognizes his great success. But then the head screams from across the room.
Part 6: “The Tomb of Legions” – Herbert West doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who will die of old age, and this final installment proves that true. The headless pilot creates a small army of West’s former zombies, breaks the original murdering dean out of the asylum, and tracks West down in his new home through the catacombs in his basement. He’s brutally murdered, but the narrator simply tells the police that he’s gone missing.
Conclusion
This isn’t an uplifting story, of course. It’s a horror story and filled with murder and mayhem. I suppose if one believes that the human soul is just a myth, this is where it would take him. I haven’t a clue as to what Lovecraft believed in real life, but I don’t foresee discovering that he also authored any Christian classics.
I may try reading H.P. Lovecraft again, if I ever get in the mood for ancient horror stories, but I just don’t see that hankering coming very soon!
©2021 E.T.