A visionary new horror novel in the style of Wells' creepiest and most enduring fictions - a future history following the descendants of the Island of Dr Moreau. In H G Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau, a shipwrecked traveller finds himself alone on an island ruled by a mad doctor and inhabited by creatures who are at once both beast and human. He escapes…but that is only the beginning of the story. The City of Dr Moreau is a sprawling history of the islanders, and an alternative vision of our own times. Spanning more than a century, criss-crossing across numerous places and many lives, we witness the growth of Moreau’s legacy, from gothic experiments to an event which changes the world. From the depths of Victorian London to a boarding house with an inhuman resident to an assassin on a twentieth-century train ordered to kill the one man who knows the truth, we follow secret skirmishes and hidden plots which emerge, eventually and violently, into the open.
'The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were animals, humanised animals...' 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 realises 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 The Island of Doctor Moreau is, like all of Wells's best fiction, is fundamentally a novel of ideas
Religious Horror and the Ecogothic explores the intersections of Anglophone Christianity and the Ecogothic, a subgenre that explores the ecocritical in Gothic literature, film, and media. Acknowledging the impact of Christian ideologies upon interpretations of human relationships with the environment, the Ecogothic in turn interrogates spiritual identity and humanity’s darker impulses in relation to ecological systems. Through a survey of Ecogothic texts from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book illuminates the ways in which a Christianized understanding of hierarchy, dominion, fear, and sublimity shapes reactions to the environment and conceptions of humanity’s place therein. It interrogates the discourses which inform environmental policy, as well as definitions of the “human” in a rapidly changing world.
Aydin, back from his journey through the realms of the Creator, is back home and still reeling from what he has experienced. He can’t stop thinking about the levels he visited on his travels through time and space to a place no one on Earth could ever comprehend. He has tried to tell his parents of his fantastic adventure, but they have dismissed it as a wild and wonderful dream. He wrestles with whether he should confide in his best friend Jim Birsha. Jim’s father, the rich, virologist and CEO of Belial Corp., Dr Samael Birsha, owns a state-of-the-art bio laboratory, where top-secret scientific experiments are conducted. Eventually he plucks up the courage to tell Jim, whom he has known since primary school. Understandably, Jim is doubtful at first but knows Aydin well enough to realize that it must be the truth. Jim listens in awe as Aydin recalls his journey through the different levels, explaining the storage of DNA designs in their trillions, and how he came within touching distance of wild and wonderful hybrids. Jim is astounded—this is a far cry from the microorganisms they studied at school. Then Aydin suggests researching what he saw in God’s HQ in the high-tech bio lab of Jim’s father. Jim agrees, but with one condition – that Aydin tells Dr Birsha every detail of his experience. Otherwise, they might not be allowed to use the lab. Aydin reluctantly goes along with the suggestion. The consequences, however, are disastrous. The saga picks up speed as Aydin is sucked into a return to God’s HQ to steal some data files. Dr Birsha and Jim successfully convince him that it isn’t stealing from the Creator but taking information that will help cure devastating diseases on Earth—a purely humanitarian mission. Their true intentions become clear to Aydin once Dr Birsha and Jim have the data files in their clutches. They use this sacred information to develop aliens for a park that would put Disneyworld to shame. Dr Birsha has become a Dr Evil. In no time at all he breeds an alien that is half fish and half tree, much like the one Aydin encountered on Level Three on his initial visit. Now the power-hungry, megalomaniac scientist proclaims himself a new Creator. Aydin watches in helpless horror as more and more hybrids emerge from the bio lab’s incubators. Meanwhile the grand opening of the Alien Park is close. More surprises come when Aydin manages to regain control of the aliens with the help of Ridz. To his shock, Dr Birsha has been working secretly on robotic versions of the biological aliens he has created, so in case things go wrong with aliens, he has a robotic alien army in reserve. In desperation, Aydin tries one more time to convince his father that he had been given privileged access to God’s Headquarters, and that he’d been duped into taking the precious data files, which are now being abused for one man’s greed. “Tell Ridz,” his father advises. But Aydin’s acute shame and regret prevent him from coming clean with the angel who gave him entry to the most sacred of places. A catastrophe is imminent if Aydin doesn’t rectify his mistakes by admitting his responsibility and returning the DNA drives to their proper place. Will Aydin be able to defeat Dr Birsha’s robotic alien army? Will biological life show itself to be superior to robotics and prove Dr Birsha wrong? In this fight to save the Federation of Pacific States and restore God’s faith in humanity, embark on a journey that will have you biting your nails and willing with all your heart good to conquer evil.
New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.
The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles is concerned with Gothic representations of London in the late 19th century. Establishing that a modern Gothic literary mode relocates the traditional rural Gothic to the late 19th century metropolis, this volume explores the cultural history of London in the 19th century. The subsequent discussion of the Gothic fictions of Stevenson, Wilde and Wells offers new perspectives from which to assess the impact of contemporary perceptions of London as a Gothicized space on the works of these novelists.
This sweeping literary encounter with the Western idea of the city moves from the early novel in England to the apocalyptic cityscapes of Thomas Pynchon. Along the way, Richard Lehan gathers a rich entourage that includes Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Bram Stoker, Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Raymond Chandler. The European city is read against the decline of feudalism and the rise of empire and totalitarianism; the American city against the phenomenon of the wilderness, the frontier, and the rise of the megalopolis and the decentered, discontinuous city that followed. Throughout this book, Lehan pursues a dialectic of order and disorder, of cities seeking to impose their presence on the surrounding chaos. Rooted in Enlightenment yearnings for reason, his journey goes from east to west, from Europe to America. In the United States, the movement is also westward and terminates in Los Angeles, a kind of land's end of the imagination, in Lehan's words. He charts a narrative continuum full of constructs that "represent" a cycle of hope and despair, of historical optimism and pessimism. Lehan presents sharply etched portrayals of the correlation between rationalism and capitalism; of the rise of the city, the decline of the landed estate, and the formation of the gothic; and of the emergence of the city and the appearance of other genres such as detective narrative and fantasy literature. He also mines disciplines such as urban studies, architecture, economics, and philosophy, uncovering material that makes his study a lively read not only for those interested in literature, but for anyone intrigued by the meanings and mysteries of urban life.
Mad surgeon-turned-vivisectionist performs ghoulish experiments that transform animals into men. Early Wells personification of the scientific quest to control the natural world and, ultimately, human nature.
