Serialised in six instalments, the story follows Herbert West from his Miskatonic days through the First World War as he pursues ever-fresher corpses for his reanimation reagent. Each experiment yields a revived subject more horrific and less human than the last.
Though Lovecraft disowned the work as a hackneyed commission, its dark-comic tone and mad-scientist premise place it in the tradition of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," and it remains one of his most adapted stories.