Herbert West, Reanimator

Told by his increasingly haunted assistant, this is the career of Herbert West, a Miskatonic medical student convinced that death is only a chemical failure he can reverse. He can, after a fashion. His reagent brings the dead back, but never whole and never right, and each subject returns more savage and more wrong than the last.

From the dissecting room to the battlefields of the Great War, West's work leaves a trail of things that should be in graves, and in the end his own creations keep the only appointment that matters. Written as a serial of grim set pieces, it is the Mythos at its most gruesome, and the ancestor of nearly every mad doctor and shambling revenant since. The Archive sets the doctor swinging, a bright horn line over very bad work.