Lovecraft Octobercraft. Herbert West: Reanimator

Last night I listened to approximately the first half of Lovecraft's story, Herbert West: Reanimator. It's kind of similar to Frankenstein except instead of working alone the narrator is a guy who is West's assistant as he goes around getting in all kinds of wacky hi-jinks trying to animate the dead.

West starts his experiments in college but falls out of favor with professors when he insists that he needs human corpses to experiment and he needs them to be fresh. I cannot overstate how many times the word fresh is used.

West and his friend sneak around and dig up bodies and try to bring them back to life with this special serum that West injects in them. And then the first one they try, they think it doesn't work but then later it probably did and now there's a zombie roaming around probably trying to kill them.

Also West reanimates this one professor who never liked his experiments and the professor became a hero after a typhoid plague struck the town but then the professor died and then he became a monster.

This story is pretty spooky but it's not really a classic psycho-mystical subconscious Lovecraft story. It's more like a gritty-grim tale of these two guys digging up dead bodies, running from the law, running from the dead bodies they dig up, waking up and getting on their grind every day. This is the working man's Lovecraft. Tom Hanks would have a role in the movie version.

I'm going to listen to the second half tonight and report back in the morning. The creepiest parts of this story are when West and the narrator feel the fear of their reanimated corpses potentially lurking. But what makes a good lovecraft story is when the turn happens, and this little trickle of weirdness and these emerging patterns finally crescendo into this enormous gaping maw of cosmic horror and chaos and evil. It's like In the Hall of the Mountain King. Go listen to that. It's like 2 minutes long. To get a sense of the increase in magnitude.

Anyway, so far this story doesn't really seem to do that. West is just a creepy guy doing creepy guy stuff.