When I started reading The Resurrectionst, I had to actually stop my reading and google who Dr. Spencer Black was. I thought he was a real person and I was fascinated. The book draws you in immediatly into the mind (and works) of Dr. Spencer Black, a man who took corpses from the grave to try to prove that the mythological creatures of legend were human ancestors.

The book is divided into two parts. The first is the (fictional) biography of Dr. Spencer. The details are lovely and it reads like a biography in the way its written and the detailing provided. The birth, early childhood, rise and fall of Dr. Spencer. The book leaves the mystery of Dr. Spencer in tact and that makes it far more convincing than if all questions had been answered. The narrator describes the discovery of new bodies, of missing details and questions that left me really wishing Dr. Spencer was real so I could google him for more information or perhaps dive into some good ol' conspiracy sites about him. Alas, there were few options for me to join in on for the fictional man.

The second half of the book is what I bought it for. I saw a post on Tumblr some months ago that had amazing anatomical sketches of centaurs. They were beautifull done and so detailed that I hunted down the book and bought it immediatly. The sketches are truly incredible and look like something from an old biology book with every individual part numbered and labelled and something I'd dread to try to memorize for my test.
The amount of detail in each of the anatomical examples takes my breath away. I want them framed above my desk where I can stare at them in wonder. Taking the mythological and breaking it down into individually labeled vertebra seems to me a new step into the magical realism realm where the mundane and the extraordinary exist side by side. Here the extraordinary are taken apart and dissected like a frog in a middle school science class.

If you're a fan of the morbid, the dark and the mythological than I suggest you find a copy of The Resurrectionist and take your time reading it. Read it several times. I've read through the book several times and each time I open it I find some new detail, some new phrasing that draws me back into the world of mystery of Dr. Spencer.

You can buy The Resurrectionst here or at our local Indie bookstore.