An extraordinary biography. A gallery of astonishing work. The legacy of a madman.
Philadelphia, the late 1870s. A city of gas lamps, cobblestone streets, and horse-drawn carriages-and home to the controversial surgeon Dr. Spencer Black. The son of a grave robber, young Dr. Black studies at Philadelphia’s esteemed Academy of Medicine, where he develops an unconventional hypothesis- What if the world’s most celebrated mythological beasts – mermaids, minotaurs, and satyrs-were in fact the evolutionary ancestors of humankind?
The Resurrectionist offers two extraordinary books in one. The first is a fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black, from a childhood spent exhuming corpses through his medical training, his travels with carnivals, and the mysterious disappearance at the end of his life. The second book is Black’s magnum opus- The Codex Extinct Animalia, a Gray’s Anatomy for mythological beasts-dragons, centaurs, Pegasus, Cerberus-all rendered in meticulously detailed anatomical illustrations. You need only look at these images to realize they are the work of a madman. The Resurrectionist tells his story.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 192
Imprint: Quirk US
Publication date: 21/05/2013
The Resurrectionist
by E B Hudspeth
Review by Mida
The Resurrectionist is a luxuriously illustrated guide to the anatomy of creatures from myth and legend. Filled to the brim with incredible detail, it’s a morbidly fascinating exploration of how different beasts could be put together. There is no hand waving of details here; every tendon and bit of sinew is rendered painstakingly on the page for you to pore over.
But that is only half the experience one gets when reading. Between the spreads of Harpy, Minotaur and Pegasus anatomy, we follow an exploration of the fictional Dr. Black as he discovers – or, the book argues, creates – unsettling remains. The ambiguity of the origins of Black’s specimens is at the heart of the story, Frankensteinian amalgams of animals from the natural world and some that defy belief.
I love this book so much. A Gothic horror in the footsteps of Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson, it creeps under your skin and lingers there for days. This is not a book you want to read in a hurry or if you want a definitive conclusion. But if you want to savour something rich and bitter and a little bit gross, I have no better recommendation.
Perfect for people who read Dragonology or Spiderwick as kids and have grown up wanting something a bit spookier.
