The Island of Doctor Moreau

Edward Prendick, a young Englishman, survives a shipwreck and is hauled aboard a vessel bound for a remote island in the Pacific. The ship carries a menagerie of animals. Its destination is the home of Dr. Moreau, a scientist who left London after his vivisection experiments became a scandal.

Montgomery, Moreau's assistant, is the physician who brought Prendick back from near death. He turns evasive whenever Prendick asks what happens behind the locked doors of the walled compound. Out in the jungle, the people Prendick glimpses move and look wrong.

Published in 1896, the novel is told in the first person by Prendick, who is horrified and complicit by turns. Moreau's cruelty is clinical rather than sadistic. The book is an early landmark of both science fiction and horror, and it sits in the tradition of Victorian scientific romance.

It asks where the line falls between a person and an animal, and what duty a scientist has toward the living creatures he remakes. Pain, law and the thin surface of civilisation drive the story. It is short enough to finish in an evening, and the pace is fast and the mood bleak.