Monday, January 09, 2006

Herbert West -- Reanimator

Where would you go, if you wanted to study how to raise the recently deceased? Personally, I would choose Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham, Mass. ... DUH!!! But don't trust anything that that old Dr. Halsey has you doing up there in the laboratories and classrooms. To get real results you will have to take your research out into the field. Make sure to steal plenty of necessary chemicals and supplies and don't tell anyone about what you are doing, except for, of course, your trusted friend who will tell the world of your adventures via a fictional letter/story (actually written by H.P. Lovecraft).

"Herbert West -- Reanimator" is a short story by the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, a weird fiction writer of the early 1900's. He lived in Providence, RI and died at the ripe old age of 45 in 1937. Herbert West is a story about a medical student obsessed with being cheating death, by reviving the recently deceased via chemicals and tinctures that he himself derived from his studies and injecting them directing into the corpse to provide the proper results. And like most Lovecraftian works, the subject of the story becomes more than just obsessed about his craft, his life's work, he is drven by his discoveries and one "success" turns into more and more invasive procedures. (no need to spoil too much of the story)

Of Lovecraft's works, Herbert West -- Reanimator is the most "zombie-esque". In other works the dead certainly do walk the earth in one way or another, but with Herbert West the living-dead come together into a vengeful legion to destroy their creator, and who knows what else. There was also a movies made in the mid-eighties called "Reanimator". I've never scene it, but His Sinfulness I'm sure has some comments to post about it.

If you have never read this short story or any Lovecraft, I highly recommend it. It involves much of the macabre and the typical youth to madness bent that Lovecraft is famous for, and... I like it... if that matters to any of you.

Well, that's it for my first post. See ya on the flip side.