The most engaging aspect of The Resurrectionist isn’t its gaslamp adventure or macabre thrills. It’s the poignant queer love story at the center of the book—which is surprising, because the plot revolves around the theft of cadavers. Those two elements should feel at the very least incongruent, but in author A. Rae Dunlap’s hands, they gel to create a heartfelt yet gruesome work of historical fiction.
The Resurrectionist is a difficult book to categorize; it is equal parts thriller, historical fiction, gothic romance and madcap adventure. While it might be a challenge to shelve, it’s eminently readable, in no small part due to the narrator’s captivating tale. The third son of a landed aristocrat, James Willoughby was destined for either the church or the military, but he found that his passion was science. Despite his family’s protestations, he enrolls in medical school in Edinburgh, Scotland, but quickly learns that the real education is occurring in private surgical schools where students learn by dissecting cadavers. James is a natural surgeon, but a dire change in his family fortune means he’s suddenly unable to pay his tuition.
Aneurin “Nye” MacKinnon, the assistant of one of James’ instructors, offers a solution. The only cadavers legally available for dissection are those of people executed for murder—and there are simply not enough murders to satisfy the growing number of medical students in Edinburgh. James initially serves only as a lookout for Nye’s body snatching crew, but he finds himself drawn further into the gang and their schemes. Body snatching is at first only a means to an end, but he begins to enjoy the mad scramble of adventures the crew experiences every night—and he grows closer to Nye, although James cannot quite articulate the feelings he knows society forbids.
When the infamous real-life body snatchers Burke and Hare make their appearance, it’s obvious to James and Nye that they aren’t stealing cadavers from graves, but rather murdering the corpses they provide to the medical schools. Burke and Hare threaten first to drive James and Nye out of business, and then to drive them into early graves themselves, leading the pair to undertake a nail-biting quest to see justice done.
While the subject matter of The Resurrectionist is certainly macabre (and Dunlap doesn’t skimp on the gory details), the novel remains upbeat and fun, never sinking into a dour gothic spirit. Even if they find their work distasteful, readers will come to love James and Nye’s irreverent crew of miscreants.