Before You Begin

Before you begin.

Harold Ward's "The Bodymaster" opens with an impossible strangling outside Doctor Darius Lessman's private sanitarium and then turns the official murder case into a record of hidden medical horror.

This LitLab edition starts at the story heading in the April 1923 issue of Weird Tales and stops before "Jungle Death." It preserves the Foreword and fourteen authored chapters. Diary subheads stay inside the chapters as part of the story's machinery rather than becoming separate chapters.

The visual edition treats the horror as dread, evidence, rooms, documents and control. It does not show surgical gore or violence as spectacle.