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The Island of Doctor Moreau - Q6: Horror
“He's unnatural,” I said. “There's something about him... of the diabolical, in fact.”
“Rum,” he said. “I can't see it.”
This novel isn't scary, but it's very creepy, with a growing sense of unease. Would you classify it as a horror novel? How does Wells use story-telling to build the mood?
Comments
I think the start is creepy, when Pendrick is trying to understand the island. The endless screams of the vivisected puma are horrific, I think, especially as Montgomery tries and fails to ignore them. I think Pendrick's sojourn in the beast's village is meant to be creepy, but that didn't have a lot of impact for me. I found the destructive ending of the book to lack tension.
Curse your sudden but inevitable dissolution!
I agree the end of the book lacked the tension that propelled us through the first half, both the dramatic and the horific tension. Prendick seems to spend his last weeks on the island in an uneasy peace with the creatures, and there are no new developments.
Earlier in the book, there was so much - the noises, Mongomery's furtive nature on the ship, the fact that he gave Prendick 'injections' while he was asleep without ever explaining what was injected or why. On the island, the increasing threat of death by stalking, which jumps when Moreau dies. Mongomery's alcohol-soaked death, and so on.
I didn't find it horror-with-a-capital-H (which typically I don't like) although there clearly were horrific features to it. But the horror was, perhaps, seated in the reader's growing understanding not only of the situation, but the apparent impossibility of ever breaking free of it.
Yes, in the understanding of the situation, but also I think in the growing understanding of what a person, specifically a scientist, is capable of. Moreau has become a near god, and has created beings, including the very worms of the earth:
"After I made a number of human creatures I made a thing... I never meant it to get away. It wasn't finished. It was purely an experiment. It was a limbless thing with a horrible face that writhed along the ground in a serpentine fashion. It was immensely strong and in infuriating pain, and it travelled in a rollicking way like a porpoise swimming... it wriggled to the northern part of the island..."
The other work this reminds me of is Heart of Darkness (adapted to the film Apocalypse Now). Heart of Darkness was published in 1899, three years after Moreau, but the inspiring incident was in 1890. But I've banged on about colonialism enough, so I'll leave people to fill in the gaps.