Herbert West–Reanimator (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

Death is not the end. It is merely a lack of proper voltage. This relentless, six-part serial narrative tracks the unholy career of Herbert West, a brilliant and ruthlessly dedicated medical student obsessed with overcoming death. West scoffs at traditional science and believes the only obstacle to perpetual life is a deficiency of chemical energy. His solution: a secret, revolutionary reagent capable of jumpstarting dead tissue. Narrated by West's long-suffering and increasingly horrified medical colleague, the story chronicles their grisly, clandestine experiments: The Early Failures: Beginning with small animals, West and the narrator soon progress to human subjects—corpses snatched from hospitals and graves. Their early attempts are disastrous, resulting in zombified, violent beings driven by primal hunger and madness. A Growing Obsession: The experiments follow West from the dissecting rooms of medical school to the trenches of the First World War, where he finds an endless supply of "fresh" material. Each reanimated corpse is a new, terrifying mistake, forced back to a horrifying parody of life. The Unavoidable Nemesis: West's greatest, most humiliating failure is the reanimation of a highly respected medical dean who had opposed his theories. The result is a creature of immense, malicious intelligence--;the "man-thing"--which haunts West's thoughts and eventually precipitates his gruesome fate. Herbert West-Reanimator is a stark, gruesome, and darkly satirical take on the Frankenstein theme.Written by H. P. Lovecraft for the pulp magazine Home Brew, it is a chilling study of scientific arrogance and the horrifying consequences of tampering with the most fundamental laws of life and death. Beware the needle. He may bring back the body, but never the soul.