Moreau was Wells' third novel. In the thrift edition, it's a little over 90 pages long. Although typically considered science fiction, the novel could also fit into the horror genre.
As you probably know from the cinematic adaptations of this novel, the basic premise is that Dr. Moreau has created human-like creatures by patching together pieces of lower animals (pumas, swine, etc). These creatures eventually revert to their beastly natures, and kill Moreau and his assistant.
I suggest this novel fits into the horror genre because Wells does an admirable job of suggesting the products of Moreau's experiments bit by bit. Additionally, the descriptions of the creations are sketchy (at best), so the reader produces the final image of each beast/human.
According to the one-page introduction in the Dover Thrift Edition, Wells was a member of the British Academy of Science. However, I question whether the "science" of this novel - or of The Invisible Man - was accurate even for its time. I have a notion that Wells concocted his science much as Stan Lee did for Marvel in the early 60s - as a pseudo-reasonable explanation for the marvalous in order to get on with the story.
Many reviews of the latest version of War of the Worlds have suggested that Wells was commenting on British Imperialism through his novel. So, as I reached the final chapters of Moreau, I wondered what Wells might have been commenting on here.
On one level, it would be easy to read the novel as being opposed to vivesection. There is, after all, moving descriptions of the pain the creatures experience.
However, it seems more likely that the novel is not a comment on animals, or human treatment of animals. It seems to me the novel is more a comment on humanity's "animal nature". By the final chapter, the narrator sounds as misanthropic as Gulliver did at the end of his famous travels.
It is in the final chapter that the narrator notes that he is never sure whether the people he sees in the city are humans, like himself, or are more of Moreau's beast/humans.
This "animal nature" of humanity is reflected in the motivations of Moreau and his assistant (Montgomery). Moreau conducts his experiments more or less in the spririt of "pure science". That is, he began his experiments with no hypothesis in mind, but with a curiosity concerning what might happen. Once he successfully creates a hybrid human-like beast, he continues simply because he can. Not to get closer to the human, not to improve the process, but simply because he can.
Can we think of a modern actor who seems to have chosen his action simply because he could? The results have certainly been, and continue to be, as beastly and destructive as Moreau's.
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