The Resurrectionist is a gritty, ominous, atmospheric, bleak gothic novel filled with multiple unreliable narrators and dislikable if not despicable characters. Set in London in the early nineteenth century, it shows the life of people surviving in London’s worst slum. Job Mowatt has become a criminal to support his lovely young daughter, Ivy. In essence, he’s become a body snatcher, digging up recently deceased bodies to sell them to medical schools for dissection, but it’s well worth his sacrifice to keep her pure and unsullied by slum life. When Dr. Percival Quinn asks Job to steal the body of a pregnant woman, it sets up a chain of events that kept me turning pages to see the bad guys versus the really bad guys. A few of the bad guys have redeeming qualities, but most do not. They must steal bodies to pay for their daily laudanum or alcohol consumption (the hard-core alcoholics are called five- and six-bottle men). One couple goes so far as to kill the cadavers they sell. As a physician I can attest to the need for cadavers to study in medical school—there’s nothing that can replace the teaching that comes with dissection—and I appreciate the leaps in progress in human anatomy made possible by grave robbing.
The prose is meticulous and tight, and the story told from multiple points of view. Though a grim portrayal of human life, the book is not without hope as evidenced in the last couple of chapters. e characters are hardened, troubled, and resourceful. And the plot, told from multiple perspectives, is a menacing tale about life, loss, tragedy, desperation, survival, manipulation, abuse, deviance, violence, class disparity, body snatching, and murder.
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The Resurrectionist (One Light Road, Inc, April 8, 2022) is available through Amazon.
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