Legacy of the Reanimator

Sample file Introduction That Tow-Headed Fiend I never set out to be Herbert West’s biographer. It wasn’t my plan. I just needed him, used him as a McGuffin to motivate my own character Doctor Stuart Hartwell in my novel, Reanimators. I needed West to have an enemy and an equal, someone who would have all his abilities when it came to the reanimation of the dead, but none of his storyline. You see at the time I was writing Reanimators, Doctor Herbert West had a seriously complicated storyline. I mean at one point he’s working for the Nazis. You knew that right? No? Let me explain. Herbert West didn’t die. Well yes he did. The problem is he didn’t stay dead. He was brought back in two round robins edited by Robert m. Price. The first was Herbert West-Reanimated followed by Herbert West—Reincarnated. TheseSample were published file in old issues of Crypt of Cthulhu, and are terribly hard to get a hold of. I being the obsessive collector had copies and used the events contained in these stories as gospel while I was writing Reanimators. I thought I was being clev- er. I made sure that my novel stayed faithful to events in “Herbert West-Reanimator”, “The Dunwich Horror”, “The Shadow Over Inns- mouth”, “The Dreams in the Witch House”, and these two round-rob- in sequels. That last part didn’t matter much because I hadn’t realized how rare, how legendary, these stories actually were. After Reanimators came out I got branded as the Reanimator guru. I knew a lot about West, not because I was a fan of the character, but because I’m a fan of continuity and understanding how things fit together, to me timelines matter. That didn’t make a bit of difference people pegged me as the expert on Herbert West. Not that I regretted it. But I should have kept my mouth shut at this point. 7 8 w Pete Rawlik But there I was reminiscing about high school and how I once stole my grandmother’s Buick Skylark to go see a movie. And then I realized that the move was Re-Animator, and the year was 1985, and soon the Thirtieth Anniversary would be upon us, and wouldn’t it be cool to do a tribute anthology. I said that on Facebook. I had my first volunteer in 18 minutes. By the end of the hour I had an email from a publisher asking me to pitch the idea. My wife used the words WHAT HAVE YOU DONE! Thankfully my friend and frequent editor, Brian M. Sammons, was there to pull my fat out of the fire and set me on a track to get this thing out of my head and into the real world. At one point I said “Let’s gather up all the existing Herbert West fiction into one volume publish it, after all, how much could there be.” I thought I knew. The truth is I knew so little. One of our priorities was to get the round robins all in one volume. Getting in contact with the authors and their estates was no easy task. Then of course we had to include Lovecraft’s original story. We also wanted to include Molly Tanzer’s subversive prequel, “Herbert West in Love”, and one of Tim Curran’s Herbert West stories, “Char- nel House”, though his longer piece “Morbid Anatomy” is equally as good and is worth seeking out. We also excluded Robert M. Price’s “The Thing from the Trenches” as he was already represented in the book three times, and was included in his collection Blasphemies and Revelations. From the episodic novel by Ron Shiflet and Glynn Owen Barrass Two Against DarknessSample, which has fileseveral appearances by the mad doctor, we took the story, “A Man Called West.” We also, for practical reasons, had to exclude novels, most notably CJ Henderson’s excellent An Eternity of Self (currently out of print), which is a direct sequel to the round robins. Also of note are the novels by Audrey Driscoll entitled The Friendship of Mortals, Islands of the Gulf and Hunting the Phoenix which can be viewed as stories about Herbert West in an alternate universe with very different characters. Finally, items not included here were works of my own, including “The Issue of Doctor Jekyll” and “Pickman’s Marble”, both of which I plan to include in my forthcoming novel concerning the life and death of Megan Halsey, Reanimatrix. I would hope that you buy that book, and never want to be accused of double dipping (too often) on a story..

Load more