Body Snatchers

By day, Amanda Dunlap edits film trailers for Disney. But by night, she’s a true-crime junkie. Dunlap ’06 took inspiration for her debut novel, written under the pen name A. Rae Dunlap, from stories of real-life “resurrection men,” grave robbers who sold stolen corpses to medical schools in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the early 19th century.  

Amanda Dunlap

Dunlap’s fascination with the resurrection men started after she listened to an episode of Aaron Mahnke’s thriller podcast, Lore, about body snatchers, as well as a season of Kate Winkler Dawson’s podcast Tenfold More Wicked. But the seeds of The Resurrectionist were first sown while Dunlap was on a trip to Edinburgh in 2019. “I was undertaking one of my favorite touristy pastimes — a ghost tour,” she says. “And part of the tour was to the Greyfriars Kirkyard.”  

The kirkyard, a common term for a churchyard or graveyard in Scotland, became a central location in the novel. The protagonist, medical student James Willoughby, who lives in a flat overlooking Greyfriars Kirkyard, strikes a deal with Aneurin “Nye” MacKinnon, a medical assistant at a prestigious private school. In exchange for tuition, Willoughby agrees to help MacKinnon catch a grave robber. But soon, he discovers that, in fact, he has been unwittingly roped into Edinburgh’s prolific body-snatching trade.  

Willoughby finds himself drawn to the macabre world of the resurrection men, as well as to the handsome and enigmatic MacKinnon. “It became obvious to me as I was writing these characters that I wanted them to be more than friends,” says Dunlap. It was important to her that the relationship be overt rather than “queer-coded,” as Victorian literature so often is. “Queer people have always existed, and they were living and loving and participating in society and solving crimes decades before it was safe to really tell those stories,” she says. 

Willoughby and MacKinnon also encounter several real historical figures throughout the novel, including William Burke and William Hare, who committed 16 murders in Edinburgh in 1828 and sold the corpses to the infamous anatomist Robert Knox to use in his lectures. “The Burke and Hare crimes are so indicative of that time period,” says Dunlap, noting the high demand for bodies by medical institutions. “Selling a single body would fetch a whole month’s wages.” 

Dunlap majored in radio/television/film at Northwestern and spends her days editing the international versions of trailers for Disney. “Even though I was at Northwestern for film school,” she says, “the well-rounded curriculum allowed me to take classes in the English department, and that continued to curate my love for reading and writing.”  

Dunlap is still close with many friends she made through Northwestern Sketch Comedy Television (NSTV), some of whom were the first to give feedback on The Resurrectionist, now a USA Today bestseller. “We still have an NSTV reunion every summer,” she says. But now “we’ve got a gaggle of kids with us.” 

Dunlap’s second book is slated for release later this year.