The following is a live reading by the Say You Love Satan podcast.

Herbert West, reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft, Part 1, from the dark.

Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in afterlife, I can speak only with extreme terror.

This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance,

but was engendered by the whole nature of his life work,

and first gained its acute form more than 17 years ago

when we were in our third year of our course at the Miscatonic University Medical School

in Arkham.

While he was with me, the wonder

and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly. And I was his closest companion. Now that

he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities

are ever more hideous than realities.

The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I have ever experienced

and is only with the reluctance that I repeated.

As I have said, it happened when we were in the medical school, where West had already made

himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of death and the possibility

of overcoming it artificially.

His views, which were wildly ridiculed by the faculty and his fellow students, hinged on

the essentially mechanistic nature of life and concerned means for operating organic machinery

of mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes.

In his experiments with the various animating solutions, he had killed and treated immense

numbers of rabbits, guinea pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he had become the prime

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