The Island of Doctor Moreau

The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were animals, humanised animals... A shipwrecked Edward Prendick finds himself stranded on a remote Noble island, the guest of a notorious scientist, Doctor Moreau. Disturbed by the cries of animals in pain, and by his encounters with half-bestial creatures, Edward slowly realises his danger and the extremes of the Doctor´s experiments. Saturated in pain and disgust, suffused with grotesque and often unbearable images of torture and bodily mutilation, The Island of Doctor Moreau is unquestionably a shocking novel. It is also a serious, and highly knowledgeable, philosophical engagement with Wells´s times, with their climate of scientific openness and advancement, but also their anxieties about the ethical nature of scientific discoveries, and their implications for religion. Darryl Jones´s introduction places the book in both its scientific and literary context; with the Origin of Species and Gulliver´s Travels, and argues that The Island of Doctor Moreau is, like all of Wells´s best fiction, is fundamentally a novel of ideas.