The Island of Dr. Moreau

H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896).

"Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau’s cruelty. I had not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor victims after they had passed from Moreau’s hands. I had shivered only at the days of actual torment in the enclosure. But now that seemed to me the lesser part. Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau — and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me. The Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully."

It may come as a surprise but the above was not written by Thomas Ligotti! It is H.G. Wells from The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) Wells’ novel becomes profoundly more horrifying when we take seriously the claim that it is human beings that are Hybrid Beast People; we are neither ideal rational agents nor beasts of nature.  It isn't the beast part that is the horror, it is the hybridity (if that’s a word) that makes both us and the beast people abominations. 

It is easy (and a mistake) to read the horror of The Island of Doctor Moreau as a comment on the superiority of rationality over our animal natures and the dangers of slipping back into our beastly ways. The reading, that we are barely held in check by social pressure and can easily give in to our inferior animalistic appetites, fails to take seriously the suffering of knowing that you exist and will die. When Pendrick returns to England, he is troubled by what he now can see in humanity around him, and his thoughts return to his horrible experiences on the island. But it isn’t our beastly natures that are worrisome, it is the shackles of self-awareness and rationality that have been tacked on to such a nature.