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. … 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.
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Graves are being desecrated for two reasons:medical teachings and experimentation by a group of doctors trying to bring forth “The Old Ones”!
The resurrectionists are robbing the Black graveyards! Salem Hawley realizes that this will not stop until it impacts the Whites of New York. A plan is hatched. At the same time the group unleashes horrors from another dimension into our world! Horror reigns!
Hicks brings us an historical account along with cosmic horrors from the “space in between”. The Old Ones that haunt the battlefields feeding on the suffering! This one gave me the heebie-jeebies! I look forward to the next Salem Hawley!
I for one sometimes get tired of books being compared to movies. I hate the pigeon-holing that can occur from a comparison and an immediate image that we all generate. As an example – if I told you a horror book I was reading reminded me of a comedy movie, you’d be thrown, confused and not sure what to think. If I said a horror book reminded me of a horror movie if you hated that movie, then you might not give the book a chance, right?
Well – at the end of last week, I found myself doing just that over on Twitter. People either saw I was reading this on Goodreads or they themselves tweeted that they wanted to read it and I chimed in.
So to go straight to the guts of what I said – this book is like watching a mashup of the following movies; Gangs of New York and Sweeney Todd (no singing!) Throw in Lovecraftian themes with a medical-gallows narrative running throughout and you have a somewhat good starting point.
Hicks also throws in social themes, based off when the story is set, and he has another winner on his hands.
Lately, I focused more on what the book brought to, minimizing the synopsis a bit, simply because you all can go read the synopsis on Goodreads, or if you’re reading this on Kendall Reviews you can scroll below this review and it’ll be there.
But there are a few plot points I’d love to expand upon a bit here.
The story follows two distinct narratives. The first is the physician’s side. Bodies are being stolen from graves, predominantly from the African-American cemeteries. On the surface, it appears to be more of the same and continued poor treatment of that group of people. Underneath though, we learn of horrible experiments being conducted – a book being used to try and open a door. Hicks does Lovecraft and cosmic horror better than most here. The battlefield scenes were astounding and you’ll find yourself smelling gunpowder and hearing injured men crying for help.
The other part of the story follows our main character – Salem Hawley. Salem is a free man now, and once he finds out about these grave robberies takes it upon himself to bring some attention to it. Soon though he is pulled into something far deeper than he imagined.
If you follow Hicks on any of his social media’s he is very vocal about the state of the world currently and posts/tweets frequently about social injustices and I enjoyed seeing this come through in the character Salem. Not much back story is given about Hawley, but we don’t need it. The way he moves and reacts and cares is enough for us to see the lifeblood Hicks has poured into this character through his words.
I chuckled at the beginning when Hicks included a character with the last name Hicks (Jr too be accurate). ‘Here we go,’ I chuckled, the author pulling a Stephen King movie cameo. But that was my ignorance to the real-life story that this book was based on, and I was glad to see Michael lay out the story (with links) and the liberties he took in the afterword.
I said it before on Twitter, but this was one of the few times I went into a book knowing it’s a part of a trilogy and was happy it was. Usually I struggle with some of those titles because I know not everything will be wrapped up, but in this case, it works really well. The main part is wrapped up and Hicks gives us Hawley’s next direction, which I can’t wait for.
This is a cosmic horror story set in the late 1700s in New York. The main character is an intelligent, likeable, former slave named Hawley.
PROS:
The descriptions of bloody torture scenes are well-done. I seriously cringed.
I loved Hicks’ take on cosmic creatures. They are crazy-bizarre, scary, and gross. So imaginative!
The climax has an exciting human vs creatures fight scene, very gory and tense.
OMGosh, the cover. Awesome.
CONS:
There were some missteps in the writing, awkward places. For example, “their feet crunched through a fresh layer of snow. Together, they walked in silence” doesn’t make sense because you can’t be crunching and silent at the same time. Fortunately, this didn’t happen too often, just enough that it interrupted my reading, and I took off half a star.
The ending left me wanting more. I understand that The Resurrectionists is book one of a series, so there needs to be some sort of cliff hanger, but it felt more like the story stopped short rather than satisfactorily wrapping up events. I took off half a star for this.
OVERALL:
I want to see more of Hawley, but perhaps he’ll play a bigger role in the next book. Overall, The Resurrectionists is creative, gory, and well-worth reading.
The story of Salem Hawley and his quest of searching the disappearance of bodies from the cemetery.. takes him to unknown occult scenarios in this horror historical fiction. A perfect prequel novella!
Unnerving! … It truly is the perfect blend of gore, horror and action. An adrenaline-fueled, no punches pulled, onslaught of gruesome action! The very definition of a page turner.