Even Lovecraft got tired of it, and (again Wikipedia is the source for this) only kept writing it because it paid him the princely sum of five dollars per part, which in those days was enough to buy a month’s worth of groceries. West and the narrator conceal their involvement.Reanimated corpse starts wrecking everything.It’s a story in six parts, but each part is essentially the same as the others: Still, if you’re after the big laughs, Herbert West is not the place to find them. Maybe Lovecraft’s point was that if anyone was going to bring dead bodies back to a kind of “life,” it would be a ruthless and unemotional scientist, not someone who sounds suspiciously like a Byronic poet.

Where Frankenstein is wracked with debilitating guilt, West is a sociopath, driven by a desire to prove his theories correct no matter what the cost. Whereas Shelley’s scientist is mad only to the extent he is prone to wild flights of passionate emotion and expressing himself in florid romantic speeches, West is hyper-rational, dispassionate, amoral, and unsentimental. At least, to the extent that parodies are supposed to be funny.Īlso, Herbert West is the antithesis of Victor Frankenstein. I would like to find a verbatim quote from the author himself on this, because the book doesn’t really feel like a parody. Or so Wikipedia claims, citing something somewhere in Lovecraft’s massive body of correspondence. Can you believe it?Īpparently, Lovecraft created this as a parody of Frankenstein. So, Herbert West is this scientist, who, get this, reanimates corpses. Even though young West should face a firing squad.īut, today I am reviewing the original tale, not any Herbert West-inspired novels, filks, or musical comedies. I never could say ‘no’ to you, my darling. Papa dear, I want to marry Herbert, since he has a power once reserved for God. Herb was a workaholic with a cold, diabolical brain.”Īnd these lines from their Fiddler on the Roof parody, “To Life”: “The work was slow and sordid in a really morbid domain. Lovecraft Historical Society, which produced two song parodies that tell you everything you need to know about the character as Lovecraft saw him. Prior to reading Friendship of Mortals, my favorite interpretation of Herbert West was that of the H.P.

(If you haven’t, you should.) Lovecraft’s sketch pales in comparison to the sprawling epic she wove out of his flimsy raw material. In other words, I know that most of you reading this have also read Audrey Driscoll’s “Herbert West” series. So much so that he caught the attention of many subsequent writers, who delved deeper into what made him tick. While no one would call him “well-developed,” he’s less of a cipher than HPL’s people usually were. Herbert West is perhaps the best-known of Lovecraft’s human characters.

Herbert west the reanimator