The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black

by E. B. Hudspeth

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594746161
Publisher:	Quirk Publishing
Publication date:	05/21/2013
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	46,804
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 10.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

E. B. Hudspeth is an artist and author living in New Jersey. This is his first book.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Disturbingly lovely . . . The Resurrectionist is itself a cabinet of curiosities, stitching history and mythology and sideshow into an altogether different creature. Deliciously macabre and beautifully grotesque.”—Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus

“A masterful mash-up of Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges, with the added allure of gorgeous, demonically detailed drawings.  I’ve never seen anything quite like The Resurrectionist, and I doubt that I will ever forget it.”—Chase Novak, author of Breed

Editorial Reviews

Hudspeth provides the biography of fictional 19th-century scientist and surgeon Spencer Black, whose work takes a dark turn when he develops a theory that birth defects are latent body memories—the body’s attempt to return to some earlier, more “perfect” form. Black’s attempts to recreate these genetic models are described through biographical writing and excerpts from his diary, creating an image of a dreadful human who is blinded by his own faulty theories. The majority of the work is taken up with Black’s magnum opus, The Codex Extinct Animalia, which contains brief descriptions of the creatures Black created, along with extensive drawings showing their appearance, skeletons, and musculature. While the textual portion of the work is horrific, the artistic portion is almost clinical in its detachment, making the interaction of the two all the more disturbing. The book is a welcome addition to any library of dark fantasy, with its beautiful portraiture and gripping description of a man’s descent into perversity. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a Scottish physician and prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction. He is most well known for his four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring the legendary and eccentric detective Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was modeled after Doyle's colleague, physician and surgeon Dr. Joseph Bell, who had been known for his acute powers of deductive observation. In his real life, Doyle worked in the name of justice too. He personally investigated two cases of innocent men who had been wrongfully imprisoned and helped to get them exonerated for their "crimes."

From the Publisher

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