Rating: ★★★★

Synopsis

Having won his emancipation after fighting on the side of the colonies during the American Revolution, Salem Hawley is a free man. Only a handful of years after the end of British rule, Hawley finds himself drawn into a new war unlike anything he has ever seen.

New York City is on the cusp of a new revolution as the science of medicine advances, but procuring bodies for study is still illegal. Bands of resurrectionists are stealing corpses from New York cemeteries, and women of the night are disappearing from the streets, only to meet grisly ends elsewhere.

After a friend’s family is robbed from their graves, Hawley is compelled to fight back against the wave of exhumations plaguing the Black cemetery. Little does he know, the theft of bodies is key to far darker arts being performed by the resurrectionists. If successful, the work of these occultists could spell the end of the fledgling American Experiment… and the world itself.

The Resurrectionists, the first book in the Salem Hawley series, is a novella of historical cosmic horror from the author of Broken Shells and Mass Hysteria

Review

Thanks to the author for an advanced reading copy of The Resurrectionists (The Salem Hawley Series, Book 1) in exchange for an honest review. Receiving this eARC did not influence my thoughts or opinions on the novella.

THAT KEALAN PATRICK BURKE COVER, THOUGH

Not since Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom have I been so intrigued by a Lovecraftian inspired novella, though the shock and awe presented in Hick’s work is truly captivating.

The character of Salem Hawley is one you can truly stand behind as he fights for the betterment of his fellow Black Man, though to say he simply falls into a greater conspiracy is putting it lightly. Something otherworldly has awakened and it’ll take more than pikes and shovels to force it back from whence it came.

The only downside I can be a little nitpicky over is that I felt like it ended abruptly. Even knowing that it is apart of something greater, I felt too wound up for it to be over. Having said that, I do like how Hick’s builds up for the coming sequels and the author notes give us a glimpse into his inspiration.

All in all, a very enjoyable read for fans of Hick’s work and for those who enjoy Lovecraftian/Cosmic horror.

I would have read this novella just because of the author, whom I admire; but the combination of history plus the Lovecraft Cosmos (a century prior to Lovecraft's own advent) made the story all the more delectable, as did the plot thread of overcoming injustice, bigotry, racism, and sexism.

A decade after the bloody American Revolution, a freed former slave, Salem Hawley, is inadvertently involved in trying to stop nefarious body-snatching in the blacks' cemetery, from which corpses are removed for anatomical studies (much as the notorious Burke and Hare in Edinburgh). The resurrectionists are not the sole issue at hand; a small group of megalomaniacal physicians at New York Hospital have seen Cosmic Truth on the battlefield. The infamous Al Azif in hand, the intent is to bring the Old Ones into our dimension, and let our world burn.