Morginal
Posted: 1922 Updated: 2025-1-18
Herbert West — Reanimator. Lovecraft and Shelley: A Parody of Frankenstein
Short Story by H. P. Lovecraft
Herbert West — Reanimator is a significant horror short fiction work by H. P. Lovecraft, which was serialized between February and July of 1922. Best known as a combination of science fiction and grotesque horror, this story introduces Herbert West, a brilliant but immoral scientist trying to overcome death by bringing back the dead to life again. As such, he proposes the grotesque and animalistic resurrection through his scientific methods of what life would be like after death, foreshadowing many horror tropes. Not only did this story inspire several films and adaptations, but it also created many sub-genres of horror, casting zombies as the modern audience knows them.
The Impending Plot
The story unfolds as the unnamed narrator looks back at his experience with West during their time together at Miskatonic University and later. West’s obsession with reanimation is such that he engages in increasingly sinister acts: grave-robbing, unethical experimentation on animals, and later humans. The narrative goes further, with West pushing science to the edge in his desperate attempt to restore life.
This first experimental reanimation involves the body of a construction worker — the tip of a chaos iceberg. West, and the narrator in tow, at once try to control the process, but monstrous outcome reanimated corpses are violent and uncontrollable. Lovecraft reiterates here that the havoc of all failures is testimony to his recurrent theme: Science divorced from ethics must lead only to ruin.
Data
Characters and Themes
Herbert West
Reanimator is the epitome of a brilliant mad scientist who is dangerously arrogant. He crosses the line of amoral human life, driven by his insane bent that seeking to defy death has nothing to do with moral concerns. It is his reanimation serum which the story revolves, leading him every time to bloody, agitated ungovernable consequences. Similarities can be found between West’s insanity and the character of Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, although in this case, Lovecraft ’s emphasis is more on the consequences of unbridled scientific ambition rather than their sympathy with the reanimated beings themselves.
The Narrator
The unnamed narrator plays the role of West’s observer and reluctant accomplice in crime. His initial fascination changes, as the experiments become more disturbing, into horror at what he learns from West’s theories. It is a critical turning point in the story when the narrator finally realizes that West’s pursuit is a dangerous obsession.
Themes
At the heart of the story, Herbert West: Reanimator deals with the menace of overreaching into science, playing god, and the thin boundary that separates genius and madness. Its supernatural aspects, like Lovecraft’s other work, also comment on the rising concern during the time about scientific achievement and the ethics of its encroachment. Within that fear, the fear of humans overstepping bounds in the exercise of their science and in the exercise of dying would manifest in the reanimated corpses.
Conclusion
Herbert West: Reanimator is a kind of science fiction horror parody of Frankenstein, in the same way that the novel is modified by deep psychological interest in the way that the monster represents the sympathetic nature of the creator. In contrast to such sympathetic possibilities, Lovecraft’s treatment is far colder, cynically regarding the tale as a moral lesson turned on its head to become a story about the perils that scientific hubris can bring.
The performance of Herbert West: Reanimator has had many far-reaching influences. Not only was it the primary innovator of the whole zombie fun in the popular culture, but it also helped to birth a biopunk subgenre in fiction that focused on the marriage of biology and technology. Much of what came after has reverberated with the horrific implications reanimation brings to resurrecting the dead, most especially George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which helped to transform the zombie into a mindless, carnivorous creature. Lovecraft’s primitive treatment of the reanimated as violent and uncontrollable continues to be one of the foundations along which modern horror films are made, testifying to the far-reaching influence he has had on the genre quasi-mythically.