What if a mad scientist, not unlike Dr. Frankenstein, needed fresh bodies, and then WWI came along?

That would've been an excellent and intriguing story. It's a real shame then that Lovecraft had that at his fingertips and instead ignored the opportunity. While the story seems cliched out the yin-yang, it's important to keep in mind that Lovecraft is the pioneer to many of these cliches: Dr. Herbert West and his unnamed assistant, medical students too brilliant for their own good, conduct in secret the Grand Mamma of all medical science -- returning life to dead bodies. And of course, the revived bodies aren't 100% what they bargained for -- as the narrator says, the partial successes are more terrifying than the total failures.

The big issue for West and company, though, is fresh bodies are hard to come by. How convenient then that one of the most vicious conflicts in world history happens along. If Lovecraft had developed this angle, he would've had such a wide tapestry to work with, but he leaves the ripe setting as soon as he arrived and returns to standard fare mad scientist territory. It certainly would've been a better way to get a longer story, instead of the narrator literally repeating everything that had happened so far at the beginning of each chapter -- I am not being facetious (well, maybe a little) when I say that I thought the narrator must have been a member of the undead as well.


(The movie, though, with Jeffrey Combs is wonderfully camp).