+++1/2
Truly horrific tale of one man's unintentional sojourn with an amoral vivisectionist who carries out his terrible experiments far from the public eye on a small island populated by his bizarre, human-like creations. Vivisection, by the way, is surgical experimentation on live animals; Wells doesn't get into the medical details, fortunately, yet manages in other ways to convey the enormity of Moreau's "House of Pain." Meanwhile, as Moreau concedes and our narrator discovers, the good doctor has so far failed to make his alterations stick, and the creatures he creates soon begin to forget their human qualites and revert to their more primitive natures. Wells' message, that mankind isn't so far removed from his animal past as he might think, is confusing and somewhat self-contradictory, but he doesn't spend a lot of time on it, either. This is a full-frontal assault on our civilized sensibilities, and it is reaching, as critics and literary historians have done, to classify it as science fiction; it is horror through and through. It isn't pleasant, but it's worth reading. Adapted several times for film, most notably in 1932 (as Island of Lost Souls), but also, among others, in 1977 and again in 1996.
Truly horrific tale of one man's unintentional sojourn with an amoral vivisectionist who carries out his terrible experiments far from the public eye on a small island populated by his bizarre, human-like creations. Vivisection, by the way, is surgical experimentation on live animals; Wells doesn't get into the medical details, fortunately, yet manages in other ways to convey the enormity of Moreau's "House of Pain." Meanwhile, as Moreau concedes and our narrator discovers, the good doctor has so far failed to make his alterations stick, and the creatures he creates soon begin to forget their human qualites and revert to their more primitive natures. Wells' message, that mankind isn't so far removed from his animal past as he might think, is confusing and somewhat self-contradictory, but he doesn't spend a lot of time on it, either. This is a full-frontal assault on our civilized sensibilities, and it is reaching, as critics and literary historians have done, to classify it as science fiction; it is horror through and through. It isn't pleasant, but it's worth reading. Adapted several times for film, most notably in 1932 (as Island of Lost Souls), but also, among others, in 1977 and again in 1996.
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