Herbert West: Reanimator

By H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft was one of the greatest horror writers of all time. His seminal work appeared in the pages of legendary Weird Tales and has influenced countless writer of the macabre. This is one of those stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
• Release date: Feb 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781609772598

H. P. Lovecraft

Renowned as one of the great horror-writers of all time, H.P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. Among his many classic horror stories, many of which were published in book form only after his death in 1937, are ‘At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror’ (1964), ‘Dagon and Other Macabre Tales’ (1965), and ‘The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions’ (1970).

Reviews for Herbert West

[altheaann · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Although presented here as one story, this is actually a series of six linked stories about the mad scientist, Dr. Herbert West. More than anything else by Lovecraft, these feel like true pulp fiction, written for pure shocking entertainment, with a dashed-off, distinctly "non-literary" feel. Originally published as a serial, the magazine that they were written for apparently (and unfortunately) demanded that Lovecraft 're-cap' previous events in each installment, which makes for repetitive, tedious reading when you're not waiting a month between segments.

Once the re-cap bits are dealt with, though, the story itself is great fun. It can be viewed as a parody of or an homage to Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' - but where Dr. Frankenstein was an earnest experimenter, Dr. West is a straight-up psychopath. Each segment tries to outdo the one before with gross and disturbing gory details. [One 'alert' - the third segment clearly reflects what can be most generously interpreted as the narrator's racism, in a way that's a different sort of unpleasant.]

I haven't seen the movie that was based on these stories. Someone told me, back when it was a recent release, that its cheesy schlockiness didn't do Lovecraft justice. But after reading the stories, I actually feel that a schlocky, campy adaptation is appropriate to the source material.

[aneris-3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Herbert West: Reanimator is told by an unnamed narrator, who became friends with Herbert West while they were both studying medicine at Miskatonic University in Arkham. It consists of six chapters ('From the Dark', 'The Plague-Daemon', 'Six Shots by Midnight', 'The Scream of the Dead', 'The Horror From the Shadows', 'The Tomb-Legions') and repetitions of West's appearance and certain events clearly show that it was written in instalments. That and the chapter cliffhangers make this story a bit annoying to read.

Still, each chapter show the obsession that was the driving force of West's life and his following degradation. It is a morbid, even cautionary, story of an obsessed scientist's quest to beat the laws of nature, of death and life. From experimenting on animals to body-snatching to finally obtaining a truly fresh specimen, West was determined to reanimate the corpses he got. And the narrator was there from the beginning to the end. 'Briefly and brutally stated, West's sole absorbing interest was a secret study of the phenomena of life and its cessation, leading toward the reanimation of the dead through injections of an excitant solution.' While West is an obsessed lunatic, the narrator doesn’t even have that to justify his actions. He started being afraid of West much later. For years he helped him get whatever he needed for his experiments.

[tobinelliott · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a fun collection, with a few different stories. All fit well with the standard, mostly-off-stage horror that is threaded through all of Lovecraft's stories. But then, just when you think you've got the pattern down, you get a curveball tossed at you in the last story, a full-on SF story with nary an unspeakable horror in sight.

Really good collection. With only three more to go in this mostly excellent collection, I'm going to be sad to see the end.