Eventually, Halsey succumbs to typhoid, and, as a final act of twisted respect for his former rival, West steals his corpse to reanimate. West begins injecting his patients with a new serum, which has no greater effect than to cause some of the bodies' eyes to open. West has a stroke of luck, though, when a typhoid epidemic breaks out and West and the narrator are called to help tend to the many dying victims. Allen Halsey, the dean of the medical school, refuses to allow him access to human cadavers or the university's dissection lab. Some time after the fire, West's research is stunted when Dr. The next day, however, the newspaper reports that a grave in potter's field, violently molested the night before, displays the claws of a beast. West accidentally sets the place on fire, after tripping over a lantern while on the way out. Later, an inhuman scream is heard from within the room containing the corpse. They take it back to the farmhouse and inject it with West's serum, but nothing happens.

One night, they steal the corpse of a construction worker who died that morning in an accident. West and the narrator then rob graves themselves. At first, they pay a group of men to rob graves for them, but none of the experiments is successful. The two men spirit away supplies from their medical school and set up their lab in an abandoned farmhouse. He details his time as a medical student at Miskatonic University, which is when the narrator became fascinated by West's theories, which postulate that the human body is simply a complex, organic machine which can be 'restarted.' West eventually realizes he must experiment on human subjects. The narrator recounts his history with the title character, who has recently disappeared. 1 #1–6, an amateur magazine published by his friend George Julian Houtain. Lovecraft originally serialized the story in Home Brew Vol. It is also one of the first depictions of zombies as scientifically reanimated corpses, with animalistic and uncontrollable temperaments. The story is the first to mention Lovecraft's fictional Miskatonic University. The story was the basis of the 1985 horror film Re-Animator and its sequels, in addition to numerous other adaptations in various media. It was first serialized in February through July 1922 in the amateur publication Home Brew. It was written between October 1921 and June 1922. ' Herbert West–Reanimator' is a horror short story by American writer H. March 1942 issue of Weird Tales advertising the story as 'a new Lovecraft series'

Lovecraft herbert west