In my last Lore Report, I noted an angry mob scene (the Doctors’ Riot of 1788 in New York City) that resulted from real-life incidents of body snatching. The same dynamic can be seen playing out in fictional form, in H.P. Lovecraft’s 1922 weird tale, “Herbert West: Reanimator.”

Lovecraft presents a gruesome variation on the Frankenstein story; like his literary precursor, Victor Frankenstein, the eponymous medical man West seeks to bring the dead back to life. As his outre experiments naturally require a supply of dead bodies, West is not hesitant to resort to grave robbing. West’s series of maniacal miscreations over the years, though, come back to haunt him in the story’s climax. A “grotesquely heterogeneous” “horde”–led by a headless nightmare in a Canadian officer’s uniform (Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, reanimated by West six years earlier in Flanders during World War I)–breaks into West’s sub-cellar laboratory in a home neighboring a Boston burial ground. The frightfully silent assailants might not be wielding torches and pitchforks, but their own hands prove sufficiently deadly. The story’s horrified (and perhaps unreliable) narrator recounts: “Then they all sprang at [West] and tore him to pieces before my eyes, bearing the fragments away into that subterranean vault of fabulous abominations.”

“Herbert West: Reanimator” (a tale undoubtedly overshadowed by Stuart Gordon’s gory, campy film adaptation) was dismissed by Lovecraft himself as a piece of hack work, but this proto-zombie story offers plenty of macabre mayhem and grim thrills. And its climax reverses the angry-villager formula that would be popularized by Universal horror films a decade later. Here it is not a group of stoked locals stalking a creature, but the vengeful monsters themselves who have banded together to track down and viciously execute the unscrupulous resurrectionist West.