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. The body, reanimated almost to humanity, claims otherwise screaming out before dying once more that West had in fact murdered him. West claims that he injected a preservative into the salesman’s corpse just after he unexpectedly died of a heart attack in their office. This may be their closest bout with success, but the narrator speculates how West could have found such a perfectly preserved body. Part 4: “The Scream of the Dead” – Time progresses and the men have their own practice now. Again, the serum only creates a monster which, though buried, escapes and murders a child.

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. It escapes and goes on a murdering spree before being arrested and held in an insane asylum for 16 years. The body is now a monster, a zombie (though I don’t think the word existed back then). This time the reanimation works, but not in the way they’d intended. Part 2: “The Plague Daemon” – When a Dean of their school dies, the men seek to reanimate the body. Herbert West comments at one point his own personal worldview and reasons for inventing: “Life is a chemical….the soul is a myth.” They practice on a drowning victim with little apparent success. 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. The following offers a terribly brief summary of each part. Read all together as a book, it’s repetitive. Each part re-introduces the story of Herbert West up to that point, as if readers needed a refresher. The story was originally a magazine serial, and you wouldn’t need research to figure that out. Still, I made it through this story because I was curious how a hundred-year-old tale would hold up. I’ve never been tempted by Frankenstein (or his Bride), and Edgar Allen Poe was a mere curiosity for me in high school. This definitely isn’t my genre, horror stories essentially about zombies. This was the first that became available. I don’t even know what book of Lovecraft’s he ended up reading! Knowing I shouldn’t make blind recommendations, tough, I figured I should try one on for size too. Lovecraft to see if that might be a good fit. When he asked me for old-school sci-fi books or similar, I sent him to H.P. I think we’ve got similar tastes, and we tend to be two of the more faithful readers in our Siblings’ Book Club. It’s not too often that my older brother asks me for tips on good books, though I’m not sure why.

Herbert west the reanimator