**"Disturbingly lovely . . . The Resurrectionist is itself a cabinet
of curiosities, stitching history and mythology and sideshow into an
altogether different creature. Deliciously macabre and beautifully
grotesque."--Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus
**
This macabre tale--part dark fantasy, part Gray's Anatomy--tells the
chilling story of a man driven mad by his search for the truth, with
hypnotic and horrifying images.
Philadelphia, the late 1870s. A city of gas lamps, cobblestone streets,
and horse-drawn carriages--and home to the controversial surgeon Dr.
Spencer Black. The son of a grave robber, young Dr. Black studies at
Philadelphia's esteemed Academy of Medicine, where he develops an
unconventional hypothesis: that the mythological beasts of legend and
lore--including mermaids, minotaurs, and satyrs--were in fact humanity's
evolutionary ancestors. And beyond that, he wonders: what if there was a
way for humanity to reach the fuller potential these ancestors implied?
The Resurrectionist offers two extraordinary books in one. The first
part is a fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black, from his childhood
spent exhuming corpses through his medical training, his travels with
carnivals, his cruel and crazed experiments, and, finally, his
mysterious disappearance. The second part is Black's magnum opus: The
Codex Extinct Animalia, a Gray's Anatomy for mythological beasts, all
rendered in meticulously detailed anatomical illustrations.
