The Island of Doctor Moreau

"Not to eat Flesh or Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?" The chant rises from the jungle each night, sung by creatures with a leopard's eyes or a swine's jaw, dressed in rags and balanced awkwardly on legs that do not quite belong to them. Edward Prendick, hauled half-drowned from an open boat, has washed up on the island of Dr. Moreau, a vivisector hounded out of London after a journalist exposed his laboratory, who has spent years cutting and grafting animals into the shape of men, then drilling a catechism into them to hold the beast down. Wells wrote this a few years after Darwin made the line between man and animal a question science could actually answer, and he refuses to soften it: civilization, the book argues, is not a nature but a discipline, chanted nightly against a pull that never stops. Moreau calls the pain he inflicts the price of a soul. The island disagrees, and so, eventually, does Prendick, who sails home unable to look a crowded room in the face again.