Herbert West - Reanimator. (pgs. 50 - 80)
from: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
by H.P. Lovecraft, 1927
by H.P. Lovecraft, 1927
Penguin Classics, 1999, Editor: S.T Joshi
Herbert West is a series of 6 short stories within a short story (very Inception of you Lovecraft!) That focus around one man's plan to reanimate the dead (Read: Zombies) Hilarity ensures when plans go tragically, horribly, laughably wrong. All told by Dr. West's unnamed colleague.
Oh. My. Christ. Those fucking scientists, again.
Will they ever learn? Will they ever just, fucking, STOP?
Dr West is crazy, just straight up cray. He will stop at nothing to get a fresh body and try out his lifelong experiments on them. Another thing to keep in mind is that his obsession spans from the time he is a college student at Miskatonic University (Actually Lovecraft's first story to mention it, also his first published work for a trashy rag called “Home Brew”.) up until he is a well-established doctor living in Boston a few years after The Great War. This Frankenstienen love affair has been going on his entire adult life. The story gets repetitive the first few paragraphs of very “chapter”, since this was originally a series of monthly stories spanning 6 months. So there was a lot of backstory and summarizing for people who jumped into the middle of the series, but it does take on a unified, loose single plot. Which I enjoyed, since I could put it down between busy times at work/home/life and pick right back up a few hours/days later and know exactly what was going on. (Hey, when you have kids and a stressful full time job, it takes a lot to try and find time to read 30 pages! Be grateful I can produce a book a month. I guess what I'm trying to say is, don't have children, but I'm really digressing here..)
I also found pleasure in how grotesque yet funny the stories were, It was refreshing to read something that wasn't trying to scare you shitless. However, what I found truly disturbing is how Lovecraft described a recently deceased African American man as a tom-tom pounding, gorilla (pg. 63 “Buck Robinson... ...many ugly things.”) I later found out that Lovecraft was an incredibly racist, chauvinistic man who was mostly bedridden his entire life. Also, this was the 1920's where race equality wasn't a big topic of the day, I mean, we barely got women to vote at this point. So I shouldn't really expect much from him. Herbert does get his comeuppance in the end, when the reanimated dead come back in the last chapter, which is really quite funny and I will not to repeat the ending here, but oh man. Go read this story for some ghoulish laffs!
Dead folks are funny
Seriously, Sthap.
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