The Resurrectionists By Michael Patrick Hicks – A Book Review

Blurb: 

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.

 

Author: Michael Patrick Hicks

Publisher: High Fever Books

Release Date: 04/06/2019

Pages: 156

My Chosen Format: Kindle

My Rating of ‘The Resurrectionists’: 5 out of 5

Purchase: Amazon UK, Amazon US

 

Review:

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review.

The Resurrectionists was a deliciously dark and tortuously good rollercoaster ride of cosmic horror. I’m so glad to see that it’s the first in a series as Mr Hawley’s work clearly isn’t through and I am already eager to read more of his adventures.

Salem Hawley is a former slave living in late 18^th century America and recently having earned his freedom, fast learns that being a free man just means you don’t know from which way the oppression or beatings will come

The underlying theme of this novella is the strong sense of community that the recently freed slaves have and how, on some level, they each depend on one another to get by. Whether it’s writing a letter for those too illiterate to do so for themselves or taking up arms against those oppressing one of their fellow ex-brothers in chains.

The Resurrectionists focuses on those in the medic profession who unearth bodies to use in their experiments. Not simply experiments to further the human understanding of medicine. As cruel as stealing bodies is, that would be a noble and forgivable reason compared to the actual reason … desecration in the name of calling forth cosmic gods of darkness to our mortal plane.

In the opening line of this review I said that it was ‘tortuously good’. That wasn’t just a pretty tagline or play on words. That’s a genuine clue as to what to expect. If you don’t like reading of torture in extravagant detail then this book most certainly is not for you. You pretty much get hit in the face with a vast array of human suffering right from the get go.

Also, if racism in historical fiction offends you to the point of giving bad reviews (the N-word in various forms gets thrown out quite a lot, as do senseless beatings) then do yourself a favour and do not read this as you’ll only give the author a poor review score, which he genuinely does not deserve. 

The Resurrectionists is a fantastic novella-sized offering of the dark and sadisticness of human nature from a time that is thankfully long in the past. The novella is set in 1788 and, as such, the Doctor’s Riot focuses heavily in this piece. The author did take a few liberties, as any good historical fiction author is want to do (after all, history doesn’t always happen in such a way that accommodates the sudden appearance of cosmic gods of darkness), but does so in such a way that does not detract from the story and his liberties blend in seamlessly.