Herbert West: Re-Animator

Description

In the early 20th century, before the time of Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft was considered one of the greatest horror story writers in the world. Among his many acclaimed stories and novels, such as The Call of Cthulhu, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Whisper in the Darkness, Lovecraft also wrote many fragments of stories and texts, as well as collections of short stories that, while far less popular, remain among the gems of his career as an author of pulp and horror fiction.

Herbert West: Re-Animator is one of these stories, and is actually among the ones that were later serialized and even turned into a movie. This is actually a series of six short stories about deranged scientist Herbert West, written as a series of chapters that make up the entirety of a single story. Lovecraft’s book is more or less written as an homage to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but with much darker, more macabre connotations.

The book is written from the perspective of an unnamed narrator who was friends with Herbert West at Miskatonic University in Arkham. Herbert West was a scientist who came to be in constant conflict with the laws of nature, trying to find loopholes and ways around death, and often unscrupulously experimenting with humans and animals to achieve that goal. Obsessed and driven by a force that seemed to be beyond his control at times, West’s slow descent into madness becomes obvious as each chapter presents us with renewed, increasingly disturbing passages that were uncommon in horror tales during Lovecraft’s era.

A true pioneer of horror fiction, H.P. Lovecraft proves his talent in full through this story, his methodical approach and macabre style becoming an inspiration to many later authors who managed to take his ideas further, but only many decades later.
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