No one would deem “Herbert West—Reanimator” a masterpiece of subtlety, but it is rather engaging in its lurid way. It is also my belief that the story, while not starting out as a parody, became one as time went on. In other words, Lovecraft initially attempted to write a more or less serious, if quite “grewsome,” supernatural tale but, as he perceived the increasing absurdity of the enterprise, abandoned the attempt and turned the story into what it in fact was all along, a self-parody. The philosophical subtext of the story may bear out this interpretation. We have already seen that
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