The winter evening settled down over the town of Bolton, with snow falling past the windows of the office of Doctors Danforth Kane and myself, Herbert West. Christmas Eve, and while I prepared to ‘hold down the fort’, Danforth donned his greatcoat, preparatory to leaving for the night and a Christmas Eve fete with his intended. As I no longer believed in Jesus of Nazareth as the avatar of God who had clearly turned his back upon his own celebration, if he existed at all, I no longer saw much need for me to celebrate it.
—R. C. Mulhare, “The Horror in the Stable” in
Deadman’s Tome: Cthulhu Christmas Special and Other Yuletide Tales (2017) 50
Of all of Lovecraft’s works, “Herbert West—Reanimator” is arguably the most deliberately and gleefully outrageous; with West as the caricature of the mad scientist without conscience, and outrage often heaping on outrage. This lends itself equally gleeful parody, as in “Kanye West—Reanimator” (2015) by Joshua Chaplinsky, “Herburt East: Refuckinator” (2012) by Lula Lisbon, and Reanimator (2020) by Juscelino Neco & H. P. Lovecraft, and to reinterpretation that unveils new sides of West and his work, such as “Herbert West in Love” (2012) by Molly Tanzer and “(UN)Bury Your Gays: A Queering of Herbert West – Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft” (2022) by Clinton W. Waters. Even direct expansions of the Reanimator mythos, such as Peter Rawlik’s Reanimators (2013) and Reanimatrix (2016), and the anthology Legacy of the Reanimator (2015), are often gleefully transgressive. It’s the nature and appeal of the characters and their stories.
But what does the Re-animator have to do with Christmas?
Arguably, the first Herbert West/Christmas episode was “Herbert West—Reincarnated: Part II, The Horror from the Holy Land” (1999) by Brian McNaughton. This was part of a series of sequels to Lovecraft’s original stories, postulating on the continued existence and adventures of West and the nameless narrator of his tales. In this case, McNaughton had the pair working for Nazi Germany, and tasked with reanimating an almost two-thousand-year-old corpse recovered from the Middle East. This second miraculous resurrection was accomplished, although what returned for its second birth was typical of West’s other experiments. The reanimated Jesus, however, only makes this a Christmas tale by technicality. For stories that are set at the right time and setting, we have to look at works like R. C. Mulhare’s “The Horror in the Stable.”
Horror is a Christmas tradition, although that tradition began with rather staid ghost stories, as composed by M. R. James (and as lampooned by Jerome K. Jerome), and today is more common with horror films set during the holiday, from the classic Black Christmas (1974) and Gremlins (1984) to more contemporary fare like Krampus (2015) and Red Snow (2021). Many of these works take advantage of both the natural attributes of the winter holiday setting—the weather, the social gatherings (or lack thereof), and the emotions those invoke—and the juxtaposition of the bright, festive holiday with gore, terror, melancholy, and fear that are hallmarks of the horror tale.
“The Horror in the Stable” does both of these things. It reads like a lost episode from the original “Herbert West—Reanimator” series, save that it is told from West’s own point of view; the nameless narrator has the night off for Christmas (and, as a jest, Mulhare borrows a bit from Re-Animator (1985), giving the narrator’s name as Danforth Kane). West is called by the police to a nearby barn, though he finds no expectant mother or manger prepared to house a holy infant. Instead there are a pair of brutalized child patients, one of whom is a little too far gone…for anyone except Herbert West.
Taking a vial of the serum which Danforth and I had worked to perfect, from a hidden pocket inside my satchel, I filled a clean syringe with the liquid and injected it into the back of the boy’s skull above the top of the spine. “A painkiller to ease their sufferings in this state,” I said, answering the officer’s questioning look and the better to hide our work in plain sight.
—R. C. Mulhare, “The Horror in the Stable” in
Deadman’s Tome: Cthulhu Christmas Special and Other Yuletide Tales (2017) 53
Which has the expected results. If there is a criticism to level at this story, it is that despite West’s victim being a child and the events being set at Christmas, it isn’t quite as outrageous as it could be. The one is more melancholy than sanguine; much of the horror of the story is subtle. The children are orphans who lived hard lives, and West, surprisingly, isn’t unsympathetic. Mulhare takes advantage of the opportunity to flesh West out a little, without detracting from his overall menace or obsession. The finale, when it comes, is gruesome—but it is also familiar.
In his arms he clutched, as a child might clutch a new toy given him for Christmas, a small, pale leg, with one tattered shoe covering the foot.
—R. C. Mulhare, “The Horror in the Stable” in
Deadman’s Tome: Cthulhu Christmas Special and Other Yuletide Tales (2017) 56
We’ve seen this before, so it loses something of its impact here. Yet neither is it inappropriate. This is an episode that could slot easily into the existing Herbert West mythology, without need for extensive glosses. Like picking up an old book and finding a leaf uncut, never read all these years, and with the swipe of a knife the lost episode is revealed.
What is Herbert West to Christmas? In the canon of Lovecraftian Christmas tales, like “Keeping Festival” (1997) by Mollie L. Burleson and “A Very Cthulhu Christmas” (2016) by Melissa McCann, “The Horror in the Stable” slots in as a tale that acknowledges the holiday without celebrating it. West is an atheist; he stands apart from the carolers and the revelers, and if he blasphemes against God and Christ, he does so without acknowledging them. The horrors are secular horrors for a largely secular holiday…and in the context of the Re-Animator tales, that works.
“The Horror in the Stable” by R. C. Mulhare was first published in Deadman’s Tome: Cthulhu Christmas Special and Other Yuletide Tales (2017). It has not been reprinted.
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.
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