Kanye West – Reanimator: WTF did I just read?!

Kanye West – Reanimator is an, um, interesting read.

I’m not much of a horror guy. I don’t really enjoy horror movies or horror novels. Sure, I’ll watch something like Evil Dead, or read a Stephen King novel here and there, but horror isn’t a genre that I really care about.

However, I love absurd concepts. So when I stumbled across Kanye West – Reanimator on Amazon, I just had to read it.

Kanye West – Reanimator, written by Joshua Chaplinsky, is an absurd twist on the H.P. Lovecraft classic Herbert West – Reanimator. I’ll admit, I’m not familiar with Lovecraft’s work beyond knowing who Cthulhu is, but I’m a fan of Kanye’s earlier albums, College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation. The idea of combining Kanye West with Lovecraft is something so insane that you see it and you absolutely need to know how the hell it works.

And, for the most part, it works surprisingly well. For what it is, Kanye West – Reanimator is an okay read and a clever little parody of Lovecraft’s work. Chaplinsky takes Lovecraft’s original text and modifies it into a humorous story about Kanye West using his music to resurrect the dead, and creating a unique mashup that honestly got more chuckles out of me than I expected.

The story is told from the perspective of “Kanye’s assistant”, an unnamed close friend of Kanye from college (“Some would say too close”, as the author reminds us repeatedly throughout the story) who is with Kanye while he carries out experiments to reanimate dead bodies by injecting them with his music. Among some of Ye’s “experiments” are Roc-A-Fella Records co-founder Damon Dash, Biggie Smalls, Kanye’s own mother, and even Jay-Z.

I really didn’t know what to expect going into this book. “This book is Kanye West mixed with Lovecraft” isn’t something I ever thought I’d be writing. Usually when I see an unusual concept I can say “This is either going to be really good or really bad”, but in this case the concept was so unusual that I genuinely had no idea if I should expect this book to be hilarious or awful.

I give the author credit, he made this absurd idea work about as well as anyone could. Like I said, I never read Lovecraft, but I did some research and found that Chaplinsky took Lovecraft’s original text and changed the words to be relevant to Kanye. It’s easy to call this lazy half-assed plagiarism, but I read some of the original text and compared it to Chaplinsky’s rewrites, and, while it’s pretty close, it’s not a word-for-word rewrite in the same vein as the guy who replaced every instance of the word “wand” with “wang” in Harry Potter. Chaplinsky put at least some effort into the changes he made. He captures Kanye’s trademark arrogance pretty well, and the music references don’t feel shoehorned in.

It’s also important to note that Herbert West – Reanimator entered the public domain in 2017, so copyright law doesn’t really apply here anyway.

Most important of all though, I love this cover:

To quote one of the Amazon reviews that Chaplinsky quotes on the inside of the book:

The book isn’t as good as its cover. To be fair though, it’s a big cover to live up to.

I’m not one to judge a book by its cover, but I won’t deny that the cover was a deciding factor in buying this book. It’s fucking great, right down to the fake wear-and-tear effect.

While the book gave me a few quick laughs, it wasn’t anything special or memorable. This is a book that you’ll probably read once then forget you own. I paid $10 for the paperback version, and it definitely wasn’t worth that much. I see the Kindle version is $3, which I’d say is more of a fair price.

It’s a short read, coming in at under 80 pages. Which makes sense, as the source material was a short story that was under 50 pages. If you’re a fast reader like me, you’ll probably blow through this in under an hour.

All in all, Kanye West – Reanimator is an okay read if you’re looking for something quick and cheap for your Kindle library, and a silly little spoof on both Lovecraft and Kanye that doesn’t take itself seriously. If you’ve got an hour and a few bucks to kill, give it a read.