He just wasn’t out about it yet.īrian McNaughton may have been the first to really play with the idea in “Herbert West-Reincarnated: Part II, The Horror from the Holy Land” (2000), published in Crypt of Cthulhu #106 and his collection Nasty Stories. One might also add the loneliness of the outsiders, forced to hide their actions from the world, forced out onto the fringes just to be themselves without discrimination.įor queer folk, reading into the text or the adaptations something of their own experience, maybe Herbert West was always queer too. The basic building blocks were always there, from the beginning: West and his unnamed partner’s close homosocial bond, like Holmes and his Watson Lovecraft’s typical asexuality and lack of romance in the story the allegorical implications of men trying to create life without women, especially via the Freudian technique of injecting some of their special serum into the body. It is harder to pin down when the queer interpretations began. Herbert West has become one of Lovecraft’s breakout characters. It inspired a franchise of movies, a novelization, comic books, merchandise, and stories chronicling the further adventure of the reanimator, his foes and rivals. The film, with the iconic performance by Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West and the glowing green reanimation agent, was a smash success. From there it entered the domain of reprints, and it became the basis for the 1985 film Reanimator. Commercial hack work, and Lovecraft knew it it would not be published again until Lovecraft was safely dead and beyond objecting. Lovecraft’s first commercial work went into print: six brief tales of gruesome mad science, for which he was to be paid five dollars an episode. In 1922, before Weird Tales had ever hit the stands, H. How do you go about queering Herbert West? Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion.
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