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| Friday, February 13, 2015 05:42 AM |
| (Last updated on Friday, February 13, 2015 05:45 AM) | | Book Report - The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black |
 by Fëanor |
E. B. Hudspeth's The Resurrectionist is a horror novel in an unusual format. It's split into two parts. The first is a biography of Dr. Spencer Black, who lived during the late 19th and early 20th century. The second is a document supposedly written and illustrated by Black, with editorial commentary throughout. The whole is written as non-fiction, as if Black was a real person. The first section even includes quotes from various primary sources - letters, manuscripts, newspaper articles, etc.
Black starts out a promising and brilliant surgeon, but his choice of specialty - deformities and mutations - is frowned upon as a waste of his skills, and his studies, the theories he develops, and the wild rage with which he defends them make him less and less popular with the establishment until he is finally forced out completely and decides to take his theories and work on the road as a traveling circus or freak show. His controversial theory is that mutations and deformities in modern people and animals are actually nature's way of harkening back to other, ancestral forms of life. So, for instance, a person born without arms is just a failed attempt at a throwback to a time when people had wings instead of arms. He is utterly convinced of the truth of his theory, and so determined to find proof for it that he begins, horribly, to manufacture his own hideous hybrid creatures.
There's the suggestion that perhaps Black isn't entirely mistaken, or at least that he's been able to create some actual living, functioning hybrids, but the narrator remains unconvinced, and there isn't enough in the text to do more than vaguely creep out the reader.
I've always enjoyed the technique of creating story through letters and journal entries. It's a great way to build drama and horror. The most effective part of Bram Stoker's Dracula is the series of journal entries from the doomed ship. This book fails to take full advantage of the trope, however. There are definitely effective sequences, such as the description of the scene that occurs when Black brings his family out to his shed to show off the hideous progress he's made in his work. And I enjoy the matter-of-fact tone and the effective parody of a real biography. But Black's theories are never convincing or particularly frightening. The book comes close to achieving something really atmospheric and disturbing but doesn't quite make it.
Part of the problem might be the entirely disbelieving narrator. H.P. Lovecraft was fond of using educated, skeptical narrators, and having them only come to believe in the horror long after the reader was already convinced, thus making the horror that much more convincing, and the narrator's fall that much more dramatic. The problem here is that the narrator is never convinced, which just makes it harder for us to believe or to be really scared.
The second part of the book is a series of detailed illustrations of the anatomy of various mythological beasts (which, according to Black, are not mythological at all, but entirely real), accompanied by explanations of the beasts' behavior. The art is quite good, the drawings scientific looking, but if you're hoping for some continuation here of the story in the first part of the book, or some more deliciously creepy horror, you'll be disappointed. It's an oddly dull way to finish out the book. Scattering these drawings throughout the biographical portion of the book might have worked better. As it is, any sense of building horror that was created in the first part of the book just sort of peters out here.
I really wanted to like this book more than I did. As it is, it's still rather entertaining, with some wonderful ideas and some effective sequences. It's just disappointing to feel like it could have been so much more. |
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