Herbert West-Reanimator

H. P. Lovecraft’s story “Herbert West-Reanimator” was written as a serial story in the early 1920s. The story is done if first person following the narrator who is an assistant of Herbert West. Herbert West is a rather strange individual who is fascinated with the idea of bringing the dead back to life. In the first chapter the characters are still in med school. They set up a lab in an abandoned farmhouse by a cemetery. One night they rob a grave and bring the body back to the farmhouse where they inject it with a solution he invented to kick start the body which he believes is just a machine. When nothing happens they go to make another solution. They hear a scream that couldn’t have been made by a man and flee accidently setting the house ablaze in the process. In the second chapter they are unable to experiment due to the loss of their lab and the fact that the dean, Dr. Allan Halsey, won’t let them experiment on the cadavers. Eventually Dean Halsey dies and the West and the narrator steal his body and bring him back to life. He reacts violently and escapes killing many people before he is caught by police. The next two chapters include similar stories of the narrator and West receiving dead bodies or in one case West killing a man and the bodies being reanimated with the corpses reacting violently. In chapter five they join the army to become medics in World War 1 so they can acquire more bodies easily. While in the war West becomes friends with Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O. because he is also interested in reanimation. When Clapham-Lee gets nearly decapitated in a crash West decides to see if the body will react without the head. The results happen exactly as he would hope but they are bombed right after. In the final chapter they find out that Clapham-Lee has been going around finding all the bodies that West wasn’t quick enough in killing and they attack West.

This story seems to be one of the earliest places that we have come across a zombie that is like those of the traditional horror movie zombie. The zombies seem to all react violently and in cases of the boxer and the dean cannibalistic. The zombies seem to be a lot like those in Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” where they just look like regular people but don’t talk and seem to move on instincts with the exception of Clapham-Lee. The story also differs from others by having a fairly unique way of the zombies coming to be, with an approach that is most closely related to that of Frankenstein’s monster.