Slay Ride Lyrics
H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society
(based on "Sleigh Ride", written in 1948 with lyrics by Mitchell Parish and music by Leroy Anderson)
Come on and bring your shovel, we're out for trouble and fright.
We'll take all we can carry from the old cemetery tonight.
In potter's field we'll disinter one dead person or two.
We need the freshest we can get; nothing sloppy will do.
With a mind quite refined but defined obsessed: that's young Herbert West.
He studies into death are quite progressed.
He needs flesh that is fresh in a special way, and has no decay.
We can't use a stiff with a whiff: to avoid he'll even slay!
M.U's most brilliant student is not so prudent at times.
With loads of mad palaver he commits his cadaverous crimes.
As he injects a potion to witness motion anew,
You must admit it's terrific, Herbert's scientific breakthrough.
There's a typhoid epidemic stalking Arkham-town.
It has killed Dean Halsey, who's a doctor of renown.
But Herb's chemical-agent swiftly sent his saintly soul to hell,
While his mortal remains live in a padded cell. Well well well!
It will cause the greatest horror this town ever saw,
'Cause the Dean will tear and eat the flesh from bodies raw.
It'll look as grotesque as imagery by artist Sidney Sime.
From our laboratory in all it's glory we've fled.
I still recall in dreams that awful night and the screams of undead.
In potter's field we opened many graves always groping for breath,
All in the name of science and in outright defiance of death.
Body ripped from the crypt, terror gripped my heart, but I did my part.
I thought that Herbert West was really smart.
And alas not too fast but at last I learned his victims returned.
They came to avenge the syringe and he got the fate that he earned!
The work was slow and sordid in a really morbid domain.
Herb was a workaholic with a cold diabolical brain.
To Herb a human bein' was a mere machine made o' meat.
It only goes to show you that old death is a foe you can't cheat.
