Cover Charge #17: Herbert West - Re-Animator
a.k.a. The Pagemaster.
It's the week of Easter, and since I kind of got into Lovecraft last year (pseudo-academically, not necessarily as a fan, as you'll see if you check out my other reviews of his writings), I decided to make a theme week of it, starting with Lovecraft's original, serialized novella, Herbert West: Reanimator.
First published episodically throughout the first half of 1922, H.P. Lovecraft's Herbert West: Reanimator was written as an intentional parody and homage of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and I like it more than its long-winded inspiration.
But, as it is a serial narrative, an irritating aspect of reading it, even in my modern, audiobook fashion of doing so (the Gates Of Imagination reading got hidden, so I had to start over with the audiobook I linked above, read by Mike Bennett, though as I write this, I've discovered a reading by West himself, Jeffrey Combs, that I'm kicking myself for not noticing sooner because it's surreal and awesome), is that each new chapter begins almost anew with a nearly identical recap of not just the previous chapter, but the entire story thus far, and as such its structure fails two-fold when read in one sitting. First, taking the recaps as natural lead-ins (yes, Lovecraft does his best within the confines of the requisite medium despite being on record as saying that he hated the recaps as well, but I still use "natural" very generously) repeatedly kills the pacing of what could otherwise be a compelling, smooth, grotesque metaphor for one man's mistakes and ambitions coming back to bite him on the ass. And second, the recaps almost replace the contents of prior chapters, which does make sense for the all-physical model that media of its time (and into the early 2000s) followed, because a potential audience with limited means and availability would need to find a new story accessible regardless of where they started reading it. But for modern consumers who are overloaded and borderline coerced into experiencing content in the limited time we have, it literally reads as repetitive and unnecessary.
But those are far from the only flaws of the Reanimator story, because it's a Lovecraft story, entailiing all that that implies. Granted, because it is a more grounded, small-scale narrative than I have come to expect from him, there is almost none of Lovecraft's "repeatedly describe how scientifically indescribable the indescribable is...with science!" prose to weigh things down, and not once does he give himself the opportunity to shit on non-Euclidian geometry, but for the first three or so chapters, it feels as if he is using his first-person narrator (a frequent writing tactic I have seen the author use thus far to separate himself from the expression of his own beliefs—again, it reads that way, whether it was intended or not) to proselytize about the "evils" of radical, new, revolutionary science...and the conservative incompetence of institutional science (which totally makes sense, just like my sarcasm), using Herbert West as a mad scientist straw man to make his hypocritical argument.
Other than that, I was more engaged with the story early on, as Lovecraft paints West as a desperate man (the why is mostly left ambiguous) willing to resort to increasingly more extreme measures to unravel and cheat the mechanisms of life and death, including theft, desecration, murder, and the general reduction of the living, dead, and undead alike into disposable things by way of his experiments, with the narrator as his self-described captive assistant in his sociopathic quest to perfect a Re-Agent that will restore the freshly dead to sentient, sapient life, both men terrified but in denial of the inevitably that sometimes, they come back (and sometimes, they show up at your door with receipts and a map to where the literal bodies are buried). This is all incredible. That is, except for when we get to the chapter titled "Six Shots By Midnight"
wherein West and the assistant attempt to reanimate the corpse of a black boxer who recently died of an occupational concussion. Just take that "objectification and dehumanization of the dead and undead alike" thing I mentioned above, remember that this was written by Lovecraft in the 1920s and the corpse was a violent black man named Buck (subtle), and crank up the hateful tone of the prose on the racismometer like it's a Spinal Tap amp, and if you have even a shred of dignity, you'll feel a bubbling hatred for the author, if not a visceral impulse to display the liquefied contents of your most recently ingested meal on the nearest surface because said chapter is the most socially repulsive thing I have willingly exposed my eyes and ears to since our current shitting President last spoke on television.
I can neither wholly praise Herbert West: Reanimator as a competent, terrifying work of science-fiction horror that introduced Miskatonic University to Lovecraft's mythos and helped pioneer the science-based zombie, nor wholly condemn it as a derivative, repetitive, vehemently racist, anti-intellectual diatribe. Both things are, and can be, true at once.
I can only recommend that you read (or not) with media literacy and a good conscience, and know that there are other means out there of consuming Reanimator content, two of which I will be covering later this week. So please Stay Tuned and remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can cheat death with my online presence, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.
77
Ticketmaster,
Out.
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