Reanimators

Book excerpt: Two Men. A Bitter Rivalry. And a Quarter-Century of Unspeakable Horrors. Herbert West’s crimes against nature are well-known to those familiar with the darkest secrets of science and resurrection. Obsessed with finding a cure for mankind’s oldest malady, death itself, he has experimented upon the living and dead, leaving behind a trail of monsters, mayhem, and madness. But the story of his greatest rival has never been told.Until now. Dr. Stuart Hartwell, a colleague and contemporary of West, sets out to destroy West by uncovering the secrets of his terrible experiments, only to become that which he initially despised: a reanimator of the dead. For more than twenty years, spanning the early decades of the twentieth century, the two scientists race each other to master the mysteries of life . . . and unlife. From the grisly battlefields of the Great War to the backwoods hills and haunted coasts of Dunwich and Innsmouth, from the halls of fabled Miskatonic University to the sinking of the Titanic, their unholy quests will leave their mark upon the world—and create monsters of them both. Reanimators is an epic tale of historical horror . . . in the tradition of Anno Dracula and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.