Title: “Herbert West–Reanimator”

Author: H.P. Lovecraft

Date of First Publication: 1922

Place of Publication: Home Brew, February-July issues (amateur publication; republished in Weird Tales, ed. D. McIlwraith, March, 1942-November, 1943)

Bibliographic Reference: isfdb

Type: Short Story

Keywords: ANDROID; BYRONIC HERO; FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER; RACE and POLITICS

Critical Summary: The narrator discusses the circumstances behind Herbert West’s recent disappearance. While studying at Miskatonic University, the narrator becomes fascinated with West’s theories that the human body is an organic machine that can be restarted like any other mechanism. The two steal supplies and set up a lab in an abandoned farmhouse for their experiments. Paying an unsavory group for their work, they experiment unsuccessfully on stolen corpses. Eventually, the two steal the corpse of a construction worker who died earlier that morning. West injects his solution into the body to no seeming effect. Later, the two hear a scream from the room with the corpse. West and the narrator, frightened, flee into the night. West accidentally knocks over a lantern in his escape, which starts a fire. The newspapers the next day report a grave in the potter’s field show signs of being clawed by a beast.
Dr. Allen Halsley, dean of the medical school, stops West’s research by barring access to cadavers. A typhoid epidemic breaks out, however, and West is called to tend to the dying. Halsey dies of typhoid and West injects serum into his corpse. Halsey reanimates, but is remarkably less intelligent and more violent. Halsey beats West and the narrator and then goes on a killing spree of a dozen people before being apprehended by police. The cannibal murderer is relegated to a sanitarium.

West and the narrator become licensed doctors and openly practice in Bolton. The two continue to experiment on corpses. They inject the body of a black boxing champion, who died in an illegal street fight, with their new serum, but nothing happens. They bury the body in a meadow. Several days later, a child goes missing in the town. West and the narrator are startled when they open their door to see the reanimated boxer with the arm of the missing child hanging from his mouth. West empties his revolver into the creature.

The narrator goes on vacation to return to a man embalmed on their operating table. West says he preserved the body after the man died of a heart attack while being examined. West injects the body with his latest serum. Life returns to the man. When the narrator questions the man, the man mouths words but no sound comes out. However, before returning to the dead, he screams and thrashes violently, revealing West as his murderer.

The two serve in WWI and continue their experiments with horrific results. The two reanimated the decapitated remains of West’s commanding officer, Major Clapham, before a bomb destroyed the facilities. A year after the war, West has moved into a house connected to ancient catacombs. One night, West reads of rioters demanding the “cannibal” killer be released to them. The leader had a waxy head whose lips did not move when he spoke, and when was denied the killer, led the rioters to take him by force. West identifies this man as Clapham. After reading the article, zombies attack West’s home via the catacombs. The zombies disembowel West, and Clapham leads his army into the night. The narrator is haunted and considered mad for his knowledge of what transpired.

“Herbert West” was Lovecraft’s only serialized work and was detested by him. Lovecraft’s fear of the unwashed masses, the lower classes, the ignorant elite, and “inferior” races permeate this text. Though West draws a lineage from Frankenstein, he never expressed the self-awareness or regret of Victor. Instead, West throws himself into the maw of uncontrolled experimentation without regard to those he hurts or kills. West takes the elitism of his station as an educated white doctor to the moral extreme and while trying to cure death, instead leaves a pile of corpses behind him. All those below him are prime for experimentation, be they a working-class patient, a black boxer, a well-intentioned dean, or a fellow medic of high standing.

Administrative Notes: Entry author: Gareth O’Neal, CSUF