‘The Resurrectionist’ Author Paul Scheuring Talks Grave Robbing And His Second Novel [Interview]
This story contains spoilers for The Resurrectionist
With his second novel, Prison Break creator Paul Scheuring depicts the life of grave robbers in nauseating detail. The Resurrectionist, published by One Light Road, sets its stage in 1820s London. It was a particularly dreadful time when body-snatching was all the rage. Either for scientific/medical purposes or simply to claim a few pounds, grave robbing was an unsavory, yet profitable, trade.
In The Resurrectionist, Scheuring paints with dreary colors. Each swipe of his pen envelopes the audience. As he peels back the layers of his characters, you begin to understand their humanity and their motivations for undertaking such a disgusting line of work. In our discussion, the author dives into his research, grave robbing, and how an A-lister almost signed up for his currently-in-development TV series based on the book.
Before you check out our interview, bookmark this page and go read The Resurrectionist. Come back and get all the disgustingly juicy details.
Dread Central: Where did your research take you?
Paul Scheuring: It’s the birth of any kind of narrative for me. I’ve been writing films and TV and novels since I was young. That’s the only thing I’ve ever done. So, it’s always that little sliver of information that you hear or somebody says in passing in conversation, or it’s even a sentence in an article about something else. We’ve all been exposed to the current cultural tropes around body-snatching. A lot of them are about Igor.
The first thing I wanted to know was: why would a person do it? And I wasn’t interested in the body snatcher as a ghoul or as an antagonist. I wanted to inhabit the actual human being. That required a considerable amount of research where I was just devouring everything I could in the nonfiction world about the Georgian era when this was so prevalent in London. It was a pretty intensive research period before I actually started writing because I wanted to understand why so many people were doing this at the time so that I could write a sympathetic and realistic account of someone that would actually go into a cemetery at night and risk life and limb to pick up something that was putrid and decaying.
DC: Did the Igor character inform your work?
PS: One of the parallels doesn’t have any bearing on the actual content of [The Resurrectionist]. We all know Marty Feldman from the 1974 film, Young Frankenstein, with the bug eyes and the hood. He’s got that perfect aesthetic for the humpback grave robber. That’s what we all think of when we’re talking about grave robbers. But the advent of Igor is actually in the 1930s when Universal Pictures cornered the market on monster films. They’d done Frankenstein, The Mummy, and The Invisible Man, and they had their go-to actors like Lon Chaney, Jr. Some Hollywood producer just came up with a concept of a grave digger that would provide Victor Frankenstein with bodies, and so that’s where Igor character came in. So, it’s not even that old. It’s probably 90 years old. And it’s all just kind of blatant Hollywood… a commercial kind of need that Igor was birthed from.
DC: Did you find inspiration in any real people from your research?
PS: The easy ones are the bad guys in our story, which are Beauchamp and Gray. They’re thinly veiled versions of Burke and Hare. They were up in Scotland and became very famous because they did exactly as Beauchamp and Grey were doing, which was actually murder destitute people that no one will miss and deliver their bodies as if they were the freshest corpses dug up in cemeteries ever. I can’t remember the number that Burke and Hare got to; it’s an extraordinary number. It’s somewhere around 20 or 30.
In terms of my lead character Job, that’s just purely a creative choice of … how can I find an empathetic portrayal of the people that were doing this at the time. I did a lot of research about the political and economic conditions then that were going on in England. Big things were inflation, unemployment, and a growing kind of homeless population—a destitute, ghettoized population, because of the fallout of the Napoleonic Wars. You know, [there were] disenfranchised soldiers who had done pretty well but had been broken by circumstance.
I always joke that grave robbing at the time was kind of like a gig job. You didn’t have to be a full-time grave robber, but you could go in when you want it and get it if you heard there was a particularly valuable body that someone wanted. You could get in and out of that cemetery in an hour or two and get 20 pounds, which was a significant amount of money.
DC: Even with despicable characters like Beauchamp and Gray, there are real, human qualities that make you empathize with their plight.
PS: What really landed with me years ago, [novelist] Dave Eggers had said, “The number one trait a novelist has to have is empathy.” You have to understand why a character is doing what they’re doing. As an aside, we don’t need to get too much into religion or spirituality, but I’m Buddhist. And I don’t believe in good and evil. The general conceit in Buddhism is that people are doing what are perceived as horrible acts because they’re confused as to the proper path. All the different kinds of causal things that have gone into their life have all added up to this moment.
With all characters, I tried to go… what part of me is in that character? Can I understand why they might actually do that? In his particular story with this particular trade, I think it’s a great exercise in that because personally, I would never go into a graveyard to dig up a body. [laughs]
DC: There’s a moral complexity with the character Beddoe, whose wife has died. He wants to keep her body encased in its proper burial place, yet he has ulterior motives as to why. How did you weave those two things together?
PS: I want to complexity with the antagonist. In its simplest form, this is a story from the antagonist’s side, which is I have power, I have money, I’ve done something horrible, and I don’t want it to come to light. But the thing is, he genuinely loves this woman. He couldn’t control his temper at one point, and it went too far. It was 15 seconds of his life that he wishes he had back. It’s that thing where people try to find redemption after they’ve done something horrible like a man on death row trying to undo this horrible thing. So, Beddoe has kind of taken on this righteous position of ‘I will do everything to protect her and honor her.’
On some level, it’s a justification, and it’s nice for you to say that you’re protecting the dignity of the dead and of your wife. On the other hand, you’re also saving your own ass from getting busted for murder. That sort of complexity is what I like. There’s a reason I wrote him in the first person. I really needed to understand this character. Again, I’m certain I would never kill anyone. But I’m like, “Well, how can you get to a place where you would kill someone?” I would imagine most killings aren’t actually premeditated but just blind passion. So, I tried to live inside of his head subsequent to that killing and see how he was trying to live with it and justify it, in a way that people try to justify their actions so that they can go on being seen afterward.
DC: What is also so compelling about The Resurrectionist is you don’t shy away from the grotesque, nauseating imagery.
PS: I felt the same way doing all the research, especially in the initial stages. It’s grotesque. I’m sure you’ve read accounts of World War I trenches, for instance, and these guys basically cohabitate with the rotting corpses of the guys in the mud around them. And they get used to it. It’s that normalization process of something, that to the rest of us is grotesque. Pretty soon, they don’t even notice that it’s different. It’s the same thing. You read some of these accounts of people that were involved in the grave robbing trade, both doctors and beggars. It became very transactional. “Oh, hey, it’s 10 days old and only 30% putrefied…” “Yep, that’s a good subject.”
They don’t see anything else other than medical subjects. On this bigger side, a good specimen is being provided for the doctor. And I’m always fascinated by that normalization process because, for the rest of us, it seems impossible that you could ever normalize. But this is what happens in these circumstances. The human mind has an amazing ability to become accustomed to, and that’s extraordinary.
DC: What was the most disturbing thing you came across in your research?
PS: You can understand the medical need for [grave robbing] to advance science so that we might solve other maladies and diseases and stuff that we don’t know yet. But in terms of just pure graphic disgust, that’s what I started with in the opening chapter. You find a putrid body, and you say, “Well, I can reduce it to parts.” That was a term that resonated with me in my research. I didn’t make that up. They realized they could sell the teeth or the skull or whatever organ hadn’t decayed. Again, it’s very transactional. But for me, I’m just thinking about sorting through all the goo and coming out with certain pieces in that very kind of transactional mindset. It’s just disgusting, but I wanted to understand why they were doing it.
DC: Instead of delivering a grim ending, you offer up a bit of hope. Why was that important?
PS: I wanted The Resurrectionist to have a mixed ending. The protagonist is a good man, but he died. But he accomplished what a parent wants, which is to advance the children’s position, in order to give them an opportunity to flourish in the world. Otherwise, the whole story is for naught. It’s such a dark story otherwise. That’s why I think these sorts of messages, just generally speaking, are important for the world, as long as they’re not saccharin because then they’re dismissed.
But if I just had this unrelenting story of loss, and there’s a lot of loss in the story—a lot of people die—I’m not sure that book’s worth reading. I’m not sure the world needs that. Whereas I can take you through all of the catastrophes, and at the end, there’s something strangely spiritual about it. All the shit that we go through, metaphorically, is worth it. That’s an important message. For the drudgery that we all go through, it’s never easy, but it’s meaningful. Something good can come of it, no matter how foul your life is; there’s always hope.
DC: Creatively, you make an interesting choice to end the book with two letters. Why?
PS: How I operate is—you can tell by reading the book—I’ve pre-written the plot, and I’ve done all the research. But then as I get to these next chapters, where it gets to Bologna or whatever, then I’m trying to get to what’s really going on with the characters, and very often I have to get inside their head. And very often I have to tell the story from their point of view. Often, I’ll lapse into the first person. With that letter, I’m channeling the character.
Generally, most writers have one voice, the author’s voice, and it’s all chapters are delivered through the omniscient author’s voice. I can’t do that. I need to be more inside of the characters and so it’s very much a mosaic. It’s a stained glass window. I’m the writer, but I’m just a light behind the stained glass window. And all the different panels are refracting their own narratives and their own feelings and their own beauties and darknesses. I find it immensely rewarding and authentic. In the writing process, it keeps it very fresh and alive.
DC: In the four or five drafts you went through, were there any story beats or character moments you had to cut?
PS: I wanted to really get to the heart of Job’s backstory. He was a nobleman, and he fell and then he felt sorry for himself. I didn’t want to play that part up front. I wanted him to be this kind of Igor [character] at the beginning of The Resurrectionist and then reveal to the audience that there’s much more to this man. As such, I had to push the backstory downstream. In doing so, I increasingly had to shorten the backstory, because you can’t go on a 100-page interlude on page 150 about Job’s history.
It was actually very instructive. I actually learned something as a writer. I realized I could be very impressionistic, and I could reduce the entirety of this man’s life to a single chapter delivered in one-sentence paragraphs–that would be an impressionistic account of everything that came together to make this man who he was. That was a very interesting editorial experience.
DC: A while back on Twitter, you teased that The Resurrectionist was your new TV series. Was that a joke?
PS: It was not written to be that. I’m not pursuing Hollywood stuff too much anymore. I prefer self-sovereignty in writing prose. You have a better chance of making something good if you write a book. But what that post was regarding was somehow some producer that I didn’t know got their hands on the galleys [advanced copy] and proactively came after me and said, “We’d like to turn The Resurrectionist into a show.” So, we entered into an agreement, and we are actively looking at the highest-end talent for directing and acting. I just said, “Look, I’ll make a show out of this, but it has to be exactly right. This one is near and dear to my heart.”
DC: What can you say about the series, in general, or the casting?
PS: Let me say a couple of things. People ask, for instance, about scripts that I’ve written, like, “Who were you thinking of when you wrote this?” And I never think that way, I’ve never done that ever. But then [with this], it’s like, “Look, if we’re gonna if we’re gonna turn this into a show, you do have to think about who you might go after.” Oh, now we play this game. One of the first ones we went out to was Benedict Cumberbatch [for Job], and we had a pretty good dance with him and the production company. They quite responded to the book. He’s obviously a great actor, but at the same time, you can see him digging in a 19th-century London cemetery. So, that was one of those near misses that would have been good. But there’s a lot of near misses in Hollywood.
DC: You have two gothic novels coming down the pipeline. Are you still deep in research?
PS: No, I’m almost done with both of them. I find the research is actually my favorite part. You learn so much and you try to destroy tropes that are developed in such odd ways. One [of the two subjects] is the world of spiritualism in the 1880s in the U.S. with the American psychologist, William James, who was then the head of the American Society of Psychical Research. They were going around trying to disprove all the mediums and all the purported mystical experiences that were happening in the seances. So, it’s kind of a supernatural murder mystery. Of course, William James is one of the main characters.
Then, the second one is in 1849, in Egypt. In 1847, the first travel guide to Egypt came out in England. It’s kind of like the first Lonely Planet for the young, aspiring traveler. They all started going up the Nile, and it was a mix of being a tourist… but at the same time, they all fancied themselves as the next antiquarian, which was what they called archaeologists at the time. It’s a story of a bunch of young kids that go up the Nile, and they get a promise. But it’s too good to be true, which is an unopened tomb. As you can imagine, they dig deeper into the earth, and more is revealed and whatnot.
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The Resurrectionist is available for purchase from all major booksellers.
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