Proving that while H.P. Lovecraft might be problematic for the World Fantasy Convention the rest of the planet gives exactly zero fucks, Narragansett has released the third offering in its Lovecraft Series, the Reanimator Helles Lager.
“Herbert West — Reanimator” was Lovecraft’s first fiction sale, an episodic story in six parts for which he was paid $5 per installment. They appeared in the magazine Home Brew in 1922. The story follows the titular character and his nameless narrator assistant from their medical-student days at Miskatonic University to a small practice in Bolton, Massachusetts, to the French lines of the Great War, and finally to an exclusive practice in Boston. All the while, West pursues his obsession with conquering death by injecting corpses with a special chemical cocktail. Intentional or not, a fine sense of gallows humor permeates as the pair by turns loot graves and smuggle corpses into West’s lab, only to either run screaming from or be beaten unconscious by the serum’s successes. A recurring joke sees West’s experiments often ending in gunfire, which is the only way he can return his cadavers to a second death.
The cans, illustrated by Rhode Island artist Aaron Bosworth, reference the story’s third chapter in which West injects a dead boxer with his serum, then prematurely buries the corpse when the juicing apparently fails. The chapter is also the story’s most cringe worthy: the boxer is black, and Lovecraft pulls out the stops describing the character in subhuman terms. I believe Lovecraft’s life can be divided into two periods: the time before his 1926 separation from Sonia Greene (their divorce was never finalized); and the time afterwards, when he returned from New York to Providence, exhausted, starved, and humbled. “Reanimator” is definitely a product of the first period. Lovecraft never held anything that could be considered a regular job until 1920 — when he was 30 years old — and only began regularly traveling outside of Providence two years later. For all his autodidacticism, his views and political opinions were ignorant and provincial.
Narragansett’s Reanimator is a resurrection of their retired helles bock, richer and denser than their standard lager, and at 6.5-percent ABV, slightly less drunkifying than their other Lovecrafts. It’s already my favorite in the series; I only wish they had offered it over the summer when lagers go better. There are those who may smash the award statues and claim that what someone wrote or said a century ago marginalizes and silences them today, but Cthulhu is indifferent to their complaints — as are brewers, drinkers, publishers, readers, and just about everybody else.
Me on the previous entry in the series, Innsmouth Olde Ale.
Do you still have any of these cans handy? I’d be willing to buy one of them off you – I collect Rhode Island-themed Narragansett beer cans.