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Elements
of Gothic Literature
The
style and words employed bring a dark atmosphere. Horror, terror, diabolic,
sinister, the incarnated spirit of the devil. The repetition of the vocabulary
matches the locations: graveyards, isolated houses, and labs (in the basements).
Lovecraft often uses underground locations in his stories (in the Nameless
city, for example).
Evil deeds happen at night: body theiving and experiments too. It would
impact the readers veru differently to perform these experiments in broad
and clean daylight.
The world of HPL
Not much then of the traditional Lovecraft universe here... In fact quite
a lot. The main plot starts at the University of Miskatonic (where Lovecraft
locates a copy of the Necronomicon), in Arkham. It is enough to link it
to the Lovecraftian universe - at least as a possible fanfiction.
Some discrete hints confirm who the father is: the monster in Chapter
2 looks like a monkey, white and shapeless, exactly like the animal that
"used to be a man" in "The Beast in the Cave", an early short story. The
beast in Chapter 3, a black giant that Lovecraft compares with a gorilla
reminds us of the short story "Facts concerning the late Arthur Jermyn
and His Family" (where the narrator's bloodline mixes human and ape).
Such faint coincidences clearly show the Lovecraft touch.
The
way the story is told is strange though. Each chapter ends on a revelation,
and begins by a recall of previous events, I was looking for a reason and
found out the story has been published in 6 installments, each of around
2000 words. This repetition (making it possible for readers to jump on the
running train) gives the whole story an odd pace, as if the narrator had
a failing memory, was deranged, and repeated himself.
Lovecraft
uses pre-flashes, adding to the flashbacks. From the second sentence of
Chapter 1 we are told that Herbert West is missing, giving the end of
the chapters but raising suspense too. Chapter 4 is particularly interesting
as although the very title seems to reveal everything in fact the end
proves a total surprise to the reader.
Lovecraft
adds a small ageing description of Herbert West in every chapter, both
physically and mentally. But so much effort is balanced by a lack of description
of the narrator: we do not even know his name!
 Humour
Finding humour in this story seems difficult, but a few sentences are
really worth a smile. Lovecraft has a tongue in the cheek with "luck is
with them" when they find a corpse, that the dead man looked more "asleep
than dead", or compare the black boxer's arms to hindlegs (which is on
the edge of racism).
It
remains black humour, when West, tied to a hospital bed, says of the monster
that nearly killed them both "he was not fresh" or, when describing the
decapited body, he says "it was nearly complete".
More
humour still: "the boxer was k.o., and would remain so", the use of the
body "that I knew too well", and, last but not least Eric Moreland, who
"after studying reanimation, was now a guinea pig".
This
sordid humour is nearly graphic when he describes how they run like madmen
under the night sky, before composing the air of drunken youth".
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