Reanimatrix
Pete Rawlik
Night Shade Books
October 2016
Reviewed by David Goudsward
It is safe to say that at this point, Pete Rawlik knows the world of Lovecraft better than Lovecraft himself. Of course, Rawlik has the advantage of viewing the various stories from a distance, arranging them chronologically by the dates in the story, adding the works of Lovecraft’s devotees, and seeing the gaps in the timeline. It is in those gaps that Rawlik places his stories. His first book, Reanimators (2013), found a scientist paralleling Herbert West’s research through Arkham and environs, the plot intricately weaving his story within Lovecraft’s body of work. His second book, The Weird Company (2014), revisits the Mountains of Madness with a team of damaged, but extraordinary heroes battling a secret was against the shoggoths. The new book, Reanimatrix, takes Lovecraft and places him squarely in the world of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, where a gun was your most reliable ally against a gunsel with brass knuckles.
Robert Peaslee is a soldier in Paris after the Great War. His father, Nathaniel Peaslee, was notorious for the events as described in “The Shadows Out of Time.” Within the first two pages, Peaslee encounters one of Rawlik’s signature moves – the crossover with another author’s work. In this case, it is Locus Solus, a 1914 French novel by Raymond Roussel featuring Dr. Martial Canterel, who is essentially, a reanimator from the Herbert West school of mad science. This is an early warning to readers. Rawlik is an esoteric scholar of the pulp world, and a sly one. Like his previous two books, the text is jammed with clever little nods to events happening in other literary worlds, working on the assumption all stories take place in a shared world. Everything from The King in Yellow to the original reanimator, Victor Frankenstein make subtle (or not so subtle) appearances.
Robert Peaslee, because of his actions in France and his infamous family tree, or in spite of them, ends up in Arkham, his childhood hometown and the one place on the world he does not want to return. Only now, he’s the private gumshoe they call when the situation is too weird even for the Arkham cops. Such as the Halsey Case.
Megan Halsey had been one of Peaslee’s first cases as an Arkham detective (and another nod, this time to the Stuart Gordon films of Lovecraftian horror). She had been one of the wealthiest women in the Miskatonic Valley; she’s still wealthy, but a lot more dead. And then her the body goes missing. The scuttlebutt on the street is that her mother vanished a long tome ago, and Megan had spent a lot of money trying to bring her back, regardless of where she had ended up.
Peaslee becomes with obsessed with the murder. Retracing Megan Halsey’s steps, her trail leads from Arkham to Dunwich to Innsmouth. And as he follows the dead woman’s journey, he learns far more about her, Arkham itself, and his own family than he ever wanted. And all roads seem to keep leading back to one name – Dr. Herbert West, making Peaslee wonder if Halsey is alive (again).
It is Rawlik’s most mature work to date, alternately gory and salacious but still letting the story set the pace. It is a Lovecraftian tale that is also a tribute to the private dicks who shot and pummeled their way through the pages of the pulps. Only this time, getting killed barely slows down the bad guys, which in Arkham, is pretty much the status quo.
