reanimator ending??

[leviathan]

hi everyone,
i am relatively new to lovecraft and in fact the only book i have read in full are the 'herbert west: reanimator' sextuplet.
i found the stories to be a fantastic read and am now working on reading the entire back catalogue.

but i did feel that the ending of the reanimator was a real let-down. cosidering the actual bulk of the story contained so many clever ideas the ending seemed to lack the intelligence of the rest of the story.

did anybody else think this? maybe i missed some vital part of the story and the ending makes more sense, i dont know....

what are your thoughts?

 

[j d worthington]

Stuart Gordon's "Re-Animator", hmmm? I thought it was a good romp when I saw it when it was first released, then hadn't seen it again until a few months ago, when I got a great deal on the Millennium edition of it; reviewing it, I found it to have a lot more to it than I remembered. I'm not quite certain I understand what bothered you about the ending; if you could be a little more specific I might have a better response.

As for the stories themselves; while fun, they are by no means HPL's best -- in fact, they are among his worst, unless taken as the increasingly tongue-in-cheek self-parody they became (they started seriously enough, though hampered by the magazine's demands -- shock ending for each segment; lengthy recap for the next installment; dragging the characters through several years of "supernatural" events rather than concentrating on a single powerful one, etc.). But plenty of people (including myself, I must admit) have a fondness for these. But I think you'll find a lot of his other work much more powerful.

Back to the film: I'd say it was intentional over-the-top overkill (if you'll pardon the expression), and worked rather well as such. Also the idea that West's roommate had become so infected with the idea that he couldn't let Meg go, even knowing what she'd turn into, was a nice touch. Overall, I quite like the film, but I certainly wouldn't take it too seriously.

 

[leviathan]

im on about the books,

it thought that all the creatures on the earth uniting and coming too seek revenge on west being a very lame ending. and it all didnt seem to add up. like there needed to be more explanation for a lot of the last installment (the first 5 were fine i thought)

the was about a paragraph max detailing when the wax masked stranger [the WWI major guy?? the decapitated one?] storms the asylum for the ex-dean monster.

and the whole creatures carefully dismantling the wall of the basement to consume west then carefully re-assembling it with no trace being very strange. i thought that they were braindead flesh hungry beasts?

pardon my lovecraft ignorance, but you mentioned a magazine? what magazine did he write for? becuase i was wondering why so many of his stories are readers digest length, lol.

 

[Wayne Blackhurst]

pardon my lovecraft ignorance

This'll help! http://www.hplovecraft.com/

 

[j d worthington]

Thanks, Wayne!

 

[steve12553]

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and have an ebook version that must only be the first chapter judging by the size. Do the other chapters have different titles or are they just listed as Part 2, etc?I've enjoyed many of the movies made from Lovecraft material but have had trouble getting into the books. Maybe I just need to force myself to get started.

 

[j d worthington]

The problem with HPL -- and I'm speaking as someone who is more than a little on the nutter side where he and his work are concerned -- is that he wrote, as he himself said, in "old-fashioned leisurely prose"; which is something most modern readers simply haven't had much experience with. Which is a pity, as it allows for a great deal more subtle characterization and nuanced approaches to various emotional responses than most other forms of address.

As for the film versions: few are anything like Lovecraft himself; he isn't inherently unfilmable (as he himself believed), but his work is damned difficult to transfer to film, as it is so richly textured, but nearly always internal rather than visual. The best thing to do is simply have no expectations, and go into it waiting to see what you get; I would suggest a scattering of some of the better short stories, and perhaps The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (At the Mountains of Madness is a bit heavy for most newcomers to Lovecraft, though it's a wonderful novel). As for the shorts: "The Music of Erich Zann", "The Colour Out of Space", "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Rats in the Walls", "The Outsider", "The Shadow Out of Time" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" would be my suggestions among his better works. If you don't care for any of these, you're not likely to care for his work at all.

He tends to polarize people, I'm afraid. If you're going to pick one single work to try, I'd go for Ward. It'll give a pretty good idea of his texture. And one thing I would comment on, is his feel for "haunted history" -- there's a depth behind his settings that is rooted in both the actual historical past as well as an imagined past, and he blends the two very well indeed.

Good luck; I hope you find some things there you like. Always happy to have another HPL-fan to chat with.

 

[BeerClark]

I know what you mean about the ending, but I disagree with your conclusion.

I think the ending, while slow and a little anti-climactic, was pretty well thought out. Of course I may be assuming too much, but here's what I thought:

*****SPOILERS*******

West had been on a course of moral degradation through his pursuit of re-animation. He starts out noble, but then we watch his morality being comprimised further and further by his own choice. Then it is pushed further by murdering the salesman then later using a peer's body.

It becomes obvious that the results from re-animation are less than human creatures! And we later realize that, in fact, NONE of West's subjects were true failures. ie: the large black laborer that digs himself out of its grave. (By the way, I despise Lovecraft for putting that image of that guy at the door with the arm in my head!! LOL).

So now we fast forward to the end. And this is where I think things are thought out.. not just a 'wrap up' ending.

The first thing that I thought was sort of a creeping terror was the taking down of the basement wall. Its such a normal act (methodically and carefully taking down the brick) in such surreal circumstances (..by flesh eating zombies!!). I think part of the 'magic' of the end was how its pointed out the method of taking the wall down... while West and the narrator are standing watching.. knowing their fate. There is no description of West panicing trying to save himself (the obvious choice for a writer)... his understanding of the situation helps us understand what is going on. West's 'creations' have become sufficient numbers, and organized, to stop more abominations from being created (and probably revenge for themselves).

And the final scene of the zombies REASSEMBLING the wall. They have shut off the cycle of reanimation and now want to disappear back into the ground.. where they belong. It would have been easy to write them just tearing apart West, then running away. But Lovecraft was very specific and unexpected in what he describes in my opinion.

If someone knows of something from Lovecraft himself that explains this further, it would be interesting to hear.

Mike

 

[j d worthington]

If someone knows of something from Lovecraft himself that explains this further, it would be interesting to hear.Mike

That's a good reading of it I'd say, Mike. There's a lot more to the story (as there is with so much of his work)... ways in which he used his stories to parody various things, make social commentary, etc., without stepping outside the story (normally). As for Lovecraft's own statements about this tale, the relevant passages can be found in Selected Letters, vol. I: pp. 152 (where he simply mentions having George Julian Houtain having talked him into doing "a series of ghastly tales to order -- apparently unaware that art cannot be created to order"); 154; 157-58; 166 (sans mention of title), 179, 188-89 (sans title); 201; and vol. IV, p. 381; Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner, pp. 221, 224. None of these actually address the points you made about the ending, but rather his dismay at the constrictions he was working under, and which (given Lovecraft's personality) had something of the effect of a straitjacket on his creativity.

Nonetheless, he did manage to put some very good things in there... it's just that the stories themselves suffer greatly from his having to curb his own imagination to fit certain preconceptions....

Oh, and a long-overdue reply to Steve: yes, the different parts do indeed have titles of their own: Chapter I is "From the Dark"; Chapter II, "The Plague-Daemon"; Chapter III, "Six Shots by Moonlight" (and yes, that particular image is certainly... ummmmm... of dubious taste by today's standards); Chapter IV, "The Scream of the Dead"; Chapter V, "The Horror from the Shadows"; Chapter VI, "The Tomb-Legions".

One thing that, I'd say, has to do with one aspect of the ending -- West's passivity, etc. -- was the fact that HPL always wanted his tales to have that feeling of the inevitability of a nightmare, where the dreamer is impotent to avert what is coming... they often know (or suspect) what is in store, but such knowledge seldom -- if ever -- allows them to change the course of events. This had a lot to do with his view of determinism, I think....