The Books of Blood
World and British Fantasy Award-winning collections that announced horror's most original new voice since King — who said so, in the most famous blurb the genre owns — and founded modern body horror's literary wing.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is The Island of Doctor Moreau about?
Shipwrecked Edward Prendick washes up on a Pacific island where the exiled vivisectionist Moreau is carving animals into approximations of men, complete with a chanted Law to keep their instincts caged. The experiment is failing, the Beast Folk are regressing, and the question the novel keeps asking — what actually separates man from beast, beyond a little surgery and some rules nobody believes? — has not become more comfortable with age. The darkest of Wells's scientific romances, written in the shadow of Darwin and the vivisection debates.
Why it matters
A founding text of biological SF and uplift fiction, echoing through Cordwainer Smith, David Brin and modern bio-horror. Adapted to film several times, with famously mixed results.
Read next
The Fog
The book that confirmed The Rats was no fluke and fixed Herbert's signature — civic catastrophe as a sequence of unforgettable atrocities — influencing the entire British disaster-horror line through to Garth Marenghi's affectionate parodies.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
Widely regarded as the first science fiction novel.