Legacy of the Reanimator

This anthology devoted to Herbert West, "one of H.P. Lovecraft's most beloved characters" according to coeditor Sammons's afterword, opens with two intriguing prequels, Christine Morgan's "Thought He Was a Goner" and Molly Tanzer's "Herbert West in Love." Newcomers, though, should begin with Lovecraft's own six-part "Herbert West%E2%80%94Reanimator," about the mad quest of a medical student to prove his theory that "artificial reanimation of the dead" depends only on the condition of the corpse; the horrifying results won't surprise genre readers. The conclusion of Lovecraft's tale would seem to rule out a sequel, but most of the contributors to the round-robin "Herbert West%E2%80%94Reanimated," including Robert M. Price and Donald R. Burleson, manage to resurrect West in ingenious ways, despite some stretches such as connecting West with the Cthulhu mythos and to the Nazis. Given the limits of the central unifying concept%E2%80%94one person or another's efforts to revive the dead%E2%80%94this is a volume that benefits from not being read at one sitting. (Dec.)