Herbert West
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Herbert West is a fictional character created by H.P. Lovecraft for his short story "Herbert West—Reanimator", first published in 1922. West was played by Jeffrey Combs in the 1985 Re-Animator movie and its two sequels, Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator.
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[edit] Summary
Herbert West is the inventor of a special solution called "reagent" that when injected into a vein of the arm of a recently deceased person causes the body's mechanical, living functions to return. However, most subjects that have undergone the "re-animation" process have turned violent and have shown barely any control over their higher level functions, such as talking and thinking.
In Lovecraft's tale, Herbert West was ostracized by his medical students because he believed he could overcome death and had only one friend: the unnamed narrator of the story.
[edit] Lovecraft's stories
Lovecraft originally serialised the story in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 1–6, an amateur magazine published by one of his friends. It consisted of six parts:
- "From the Dark"
- "The Plague-Daemon"
- "Six Shots by Moonlight"
- "The Scream of the Dead"
- "The Horror From the Shadows"
- "The Tomb-Legions"
Lovecraft himself, who penned the Herbert West stories when he was in need of money, hated them and called them drivel written for the masses. In correspondence with others, he claimed to be unhappy with the work, writing it only because he was being paid five dollars for each installment. Moreover, he disliked the requirement that each installment end with a cliffhanger, which was unlike his normal style. He also had to begin each story with a recap of the previous episode.
According to his letters, Lovecraft wrote the story more as a parody of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein than as an original piece of fiction. He drops in numerous Frankenstein references (even hinting at the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as Shelley did) and purposely makes scenes overly violent, gruesome, and clichéd.
[edit] Fan following
Because of the popularity of the Re-Animator movies, Herbert West is developing a fan following to rival that of Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees on select sections of the internet, and several people have written fan fiction about him or characters related to him. There is also an online flash game of the same name based on the books. The Splatterhouse video game series was heavily based on this story, with a "Dr. West" owning the mansion.
The character of Herbert West has also had brief cameo appearances in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula novels The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula Cha Cha Cha (also known as Judgment of Tears). He most recently showed up in the Dynamite Entertainment comic miniseries Army of Darkness vs. Re-Animator, wherein he faced off against Ash Williams, hero of the Evil Dead film series.
Stuart Gordon has been quoted on several occasions as expressing a desire to make a fourth installment in the series, titled House of Re-Animator; this film would, he claims, be a political satire wherein West moves into the White House and re-animates a deceased Dick Cheney.[citation needed]
[edit] References
- Lovecraft, Howard P. [1922] (1986). “Herbert West—Reanimator”, S. T. Joshi (ed.): Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, 9th corrected printing, Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-87054-039-4. Definitive version.
- Lovecraft, Howard P. [1922] (1999). “Herbert West—Reanimator”, S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon (eds.): More Annotated Lovecraft, 1st, New York City, NY: Dell. ISBN 0-440-50875-4. With explanatory footnotes.
