An extraordinary biography. A gallery of astonishing work. The legacy of a madman.
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: What if the world’s most celebrated
mythological beasts—mermaids, minotaurs, and satyrs—were in fact the
evolutionary ancestors of humankind?
The Resurrectionist offers
two extraordinary books in one. The first is a fictional biography of
Dr. Spencer Black, from a childhood spent exhuming corpses through his
medical training, his travels with carnivals, and the mysterious
disappearance at the end of his life. The second book is Black’s magnum
opus: The Codex Extinct Animalia, a Gray’s Anatomy for
mythological beasts—dragons, centaurs, Pegasus, Cerberus—all rendered in
meticulously detailed anatomical illustrations. You need only look at
these images to realize they are the work of a madman. The Resurrectionist tells his story.
