The Island of Doctor Moreau

Adrift in a dinghy, Edward Prendick, the single survivor from the good ship Lady Vain, is rescued by a vessel carrying a profoundly unusual cargo - a menagerie of savage animals. Tended to recovery by their keeper Montgomery, who gives him dark medicine that tastes of blood, Prendick soon finds himself stranded upon an uncharted island in the Pacific with his rescuer and the beasts. Here, he meets Montgomery's master, the sinister Dr. Moreau - a brilliant scientist whose notorious experiments in vivisection have caused him to abandon the civilised world. It soon becomes clear he has been developing these experiments - with truly horrific results. A shipwreck in the South Seas, a palmy paradise where a mad doctor conducts vile experiments, animals that become human & then "beastly" in ways they never were before - -it's the stuff of high adventure. It's also a parable about Darwinian theory, a social satire in the vein of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels & a bloody tale of horror. As Wells himself wrote: "The Island of Dr. Moreau is an exercise in youthful blasphemy. Now & then, though I rarely admit it, the universe projects itself towards me in a hideous grimace. It grimaced that time, & I did my best to express my vision of the aimless torture in creation."