A shipwrecked Edward Prendick finds himself stranded on a remote Noble island, the guest of a notorious scientist, Doctor Moreau. Disturbed by the cries of animals in pain, and by his encounters with half-bestial creatures, Edward slowly realizes his danger and the extremes of the Doctor's experiments.
Saturated in pain and disgust, suffused with grotesque and often unbearable images of torture and bodily mutilation,
The Island of Doctor Moreau
is unquestionably a shocking novel. It is also a serious, and highly knowledgeable, philosophical engagement with Wells's times, with their climate of scientific openness and advancement, but also their anxieties about the ethical nature of scientific discoveries, and their implications for religion. Darryl Jones's introduction places the book in both its scientific and literary context; with the
Origin of Species
and
Gulliver's Travels
, and argues that
is, like all of Wells's best fiction, is fundamentally a novel of ideas.