( Well, I quit. )

                The key piece of horror, it seems, is caring about the characters.  I think deep, reasonable characterizations are a huge part of what makes Stephen King so successful.  He writes about the everyman, you believe the characters, and you care when horrible, horrible things start to happen to them.  I just read Jack Ketchum’s Off Season.  According to the back of the book, “five civilized, sophisticated people and one tired old country sheriff will learn just how primitive we all are beneath the surface…and that there are no limits at all to the will to survive.”  This blurb did not sell me.  I read The Girl Next Door and thought it was pretty sick, I liked it all right, but didn’t think the writing was terribly stellar.  This one is set in Maine, which I say I like, but I always scoff when writers “from away” try and do justice to my state.  Ketchum didn’t do Maine justice.  He did toss in some good facts, (Washington country was, at the time of his writing [and maybe still is] poorer than Appalachia) but he didn’t get the feel.  All the Mainers were like stereotypes of locals resenting summer people, and while this does happen, Maine natives DO have other things on their minds.

                Apparently to Jack Ketchum, “sophisticated and civilized” in this context, means “from New York City.”  They are all petulant snots who are self absorbed and absolutely unsympathetic.  The character they spent the most time on, Carla, is absolutely unlikable…and killed off very quickly, leaving the reader in the hands of relative strangers.  We were just sort of starting to get to know her when she was pulled nude from her boyfriend’s penis, dragged outside, strung up from a tree and roasted alive.  Boyfriend didn’t make it, either.  I didn’t care for the characters, I was just annoyed about the chapters I read about her cleaning the house.  I also didn’t care that she was only using the egotistical actor boyfriend for sex, especially when they both died so early on (I guess it’s fitting, she was using him for sex and they died having trashy, dirty sex.)

                These characters, both the villains (who I will address in a moment) and the protagonists (if you can call them that) all spent a lot of time naked and sexed up.  Yes, evil, animalistic hillbillies probably spend a lot of time doing “it”, but you’d think they’d have some sense of self preservation.  It’s never, I mean never, a good idea to force a captive to fellate you.  It came as such a shock when she bit off his junk.  Ketchum’s interest in sex distracted me from the horror at hand.  If the hillbillies had been more practical about their malicious intents, I would have been better sold.  And the character who was so traumatized she forgot to get dressed?  It didn’t work for me, and removed me from the action.

                The hillbillies.  They didn’t seem to have a motive.  They liked human meat, they lived in a filthy cave and impregnated one another, and they were evil.  In one of my classmate’s WIPs about hillbillies, they have a religious motive, and are very clear about their intents and purpose.  These guys have no sense of preservation, the book opens with them making a mistake and letting a woman live to tell about them.  How were they not discovered long ago?  There is no logic and no sense of self preservation (like I said above) and this pulls any interest I have in them.

                The most interesting part of the book is Ketchum’s afterword, where he discusses the publisher wanting to tame the book back in the eighties, how it was too graphic, and the concessions he made thinking “this is my first book, I’d better do what they want.”  In the original draft, the closest thing we have to a hero dies in the end, a la Night of the Living Dead, erroneously shot by the sheriff in the confusion of a shoot out.  Apparently Ballantine said no way to that, and in the original publication, he lives, giving hope to all the readers out there.  The version I read was published in 2006, and Nick dies at the end, the way he was supposed to.  It was one of the only things I did like in that book, a little “ha!” at hope.

                This was worth the $0.66 I paid for it and the few hours I spent reading it.  But man, not by much.  When I see a Stephen King recommendation on a cover (I’m talking to you, The Ruins) I need to start running in the other direction.

Near the end of the book when everything has gone to shit: Everyone is starving, they’ve abandoned the ships, the poisoned canned food has run out, all the other food has run out, a mutiny has killed (so they think) the captain, and the surgeon has been kidnapped by these mutinous cannibals.  Like I said, everything has gone to shit.  Oh yeah, and the monster is still out there, still killing.  (By the end of the book, the monster is almost the least of anyone's worries.  At least when the monster gets you, you go relatively quickly.)

The surgeon says to his cannibal captor: “All this natural misery.  Why do you men have to add to it?  Why does our species  always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and them make it worse?”  The response is telling and brilliant…the evil men “stared at the surgeon as if he had begun speaking Aramaic.”

This makes me think of 28 Days Later.  Civilization is crumbling, zombies are everywhere, and the real kicker at the end of the movie comes from the army guys.  Humans are, still and again, the dominant evil.  Why doesn’t disaster prompt us to be good to one another?  It certainly makes delicious fodder for the horror genre.  Distrust of one’s fellow man in the face of external terror thickens the stew of horror.  The monster in The Thing: scary.  The fact that the guys can’t cooperate, can’t figure out a rational, methodical plan to fight it cause they’re too busy fighting one another: extra scary.

It reminds me to remember this when working on my own novels…the monster is rarely scarier then the other humans.

On another note, I like that were the monster to be killed, white men would swarm the globe, the arctic would melt, and the polar bears and other arctic animals would die.  When was the monster killed, cause it seems that that is what has happened...

Here is a neat article/review on the book.

And here is an image of the monster I found on DeviantArt.  Good day to you all.


 

            I recently read Shogun by James Clavell.  Seeing the Japanese’ reaction to the unwashed Europeans, my first thought, before I’d picked up The Terror to re-read, was how Lady Silence must think those ships stank.  The cultural differences, her one layer of fur to the Englishmen’s fifty ineffective, damp layers of cotton and wool, made me think of Shogun some more.  I liked Shogun, but if Blackthorne had battled an inhuman monster, it would have been just a snippet more awesome.

            The thing I love Dan Simmon’s The Terror is that it’s thoroughly researched (as well as I can tell from my limited Wikipedia research).  This really happened, more or less, and Simmons tossed in a sprinkle of monster. 

The scene with the Carnivale is over the top, I think, too much.  From the beginning I knew precisely what would happen—that their revelry would turn into a bloodbath, and if I had been surprised it would have pleased me more.  The book flops into a surreal nightmare, starting when Crozier notices that he and the rest of the men are drunk (“how had they done that?” he wonders, their drunkenness is a mystery which adds to the surrealism), the bear meat (or is it bear meat?) is delicious this time around, the music player sounds like real music and not the organ grinder’s instrument.  The bear costume is too real, the decapitated likeness of Sir John Franklin is too soon.  Crozier and Fitzjames are aware of a wrongness before the rest of the men, and must struggle to regain control of the bacchanal.  The black room, the clock striking midnight…then men falling silent, and screams.  I liked reading it, but I knew it was all coming.  Dan Simmons is an excellent writer, the images were real enough, but it seemed out of place and fantastic in this so real book.

            The futility of keeping with English custom amazes and amuses me in this book, in the beginning they still shave every day, docking one’s pay is still an incentive to behave.  At least they’ve abandoned saluting.  These customs decompose as it becomes more and more evident that they aren’t going to make it home alive.  By the end they have resorted to cannibalism.

            The middle part of the book gets a little bogged down and clunky, again this is something that one can excuse due to Simmon’s excellent writing style.  For the most part the exposition doesn’t feel clunky, it’s fascinating.  The tediousness of the book, though, echoes what the characters are experiencing.  I can’t begin to fathom years, not days, not weeks…years trapped in the ice with the same hundred or so people, no television, few books (most of these folks don’t seem to be the keen on reading types), no internet…granted we are more accustomed to constant stimuli than these sailors were, but still, the cabin fever factor alone would make it’s own horror novel.  And adding to that the cold?  I cannot fathom the temperatures they are talking about.  Some of these men have done this for years in a row.  If memory serves, Crozier had been out there for 13 years.  On somethingawful.com, a raunchy website which deals with video games and other nerd-macho foolishness, they had a contributor who worked stationed in Antarctica do an article (a rather serious one, for the website) about living there.  He talked about the constant stimulus, movies, books, internet, reliable contact with home…and still people drank entirely too much and were moody and petulant and crazy.  One has to assume that ships like Terror and Erebus were equipped in the same way: to deal with cabin fever as best as their culture knew how.  But still.  Damn.

            The Terror ranks as one of my favorite horror novels because the monster is so believable.  The scenario presented here plays on a million of our paranoias, and it works.  I like Dan Simmons, I guess I should go read Hyperion now.

My book:

I like the beginning.  The characters are strong, they do interesting things.  About two thirds of the way through (maybe more like halfway through) it turns to putty, this frenetic game of cat and mouse where everyone becomes a cut out of who they were before, where secondary characters are only there to support the protagonists and they can’t stand on their own two feet.

I suspect this comes from the book diverging from a human drama into a sci-fi story.  I can write about emotions and things with weird tingles, but when we step into real genre territory, I loose my footing.  The action scenes are weak, the plot is paper thin, all I have are the characters, who, right now, are looking at me, squinting, and asking “what the fuck?”

I puked out a completed draft, and have moseyed back to the beginning.  When I felt this way about the werewolf book, (let’s take a plunge and call it by the title, since it has one) Unfortunate Son (Gah, I hate titles, it gives me a squeamish feeling in my stomach seeing it on the page) I let it sit until I was ready to come back to it with a clear head.  About six months.  The Space Puma book, which does not have a title, I’ve been worrying at for school, which has bled every drop of fun out of it.  Re-reading the beginning, letting me see my characters as they started, has been slightly helpful; it makes me remember what I like about them.

But then I look at the whole book spread out before me and wonder how I am going to do it.  Unfortunate Son always had the advantage of being split into three pieces, which made editing easier.  Sometimes I wonder if the entire problem with the Space Puma book is that I just want to be working on the Werewolf one.  While deliberately not thinking about it, I’ve had some great ideas.  I wish I could table the aliens for six months or so, work on the werewolves.  I can only surmise that ignoring the aliens would light fires in my imagination about them.  But the aliens are my thesis, and they demand my attention.

I used to think about the characters before I fell asleep, slow times at work, in the car, now I think about nothing (Except job hunting and how much I dislike my job—this is also, very likely, contributing to my lackluster approach to the aliens.)

I’m having my writing group here at home read the whole book for me, and we’re going to talk about it.  This should jump start my imagination, hopefully I can take the whole back end of the book in another direction.  They helped me so much with the werewolf book—I mean Unfortunate Son (cringe), when I think about how different that is from it’s first draft, I feel inspired that the aliens are savable, too.

This was inspired by the horror stories I read to cheer myself up from job angst.  I feel a little better now. 

            I don’t like reading short stories.  I like the meat of a novel, a big thing to hold, a journey to undertake.  Short stories are like one night stands, novellas are sort of like dating a guy knowing he’s moving to Utah at the end of the summer.  A novel is a nice, steady, long term relationship.  (There is something to be said for the fact that I find enormous book series to be daunting.  That’s just too much commitment.)

            In middle school I read Skeleton Crew by Stephen King (or maybe it was earlier…?).  Apparently I didn’t realize I was going into a book of short stories.  I finished the Mist, an amazing story, then went on to Here There Be Tygers (one of King’s first short stories, written while he was in high school).  The boy wasn’t the same boy.  After 135 pages with Billy, who the fuck was Charles?  Here There Be Tygers is short, less than five pages, so in my head, I just replaced Charles with Billy.  When I got to The Monkey, I gave up pretending, and just read the short stories.  I liked them, still do, but have never gotten over that initial shock and betrayal.

            Horror has always been about short stories.  The horror novel, with some notable exceptions, is a relatively recent construct, vaulted to its present place of popularity by Mister King himself in the late seventies, early eighties.  After last January’s go-round at school, I purchased the Dark Descent.  I got subscriptions to Cemetery Dance and Weird Tales.  I was going to read and write short stories, dammit!  I was going to experience the true nature of horror!  And I read (and loved) the required chunk of Dark Descent.  I even went a little further, but it sits on my shelf with a bookmark about halfway through.  I read the first story and a half in my first Cemetery Dance issue, then let it sit til today.  Weird Tales I haven’t touched.  A novel keeps me going ‘cause I want to know what happens next.  Every time a short story ends, there is an opportunity for me to lose interest, and set the book (or magazine) down.  Is my attention span too long, or do I simply not have the discipline?

            I read two stories in Cemetery Dance today (Issue #59, if anyone is reading along at home).  I like the Bog Man story, did not care for the Painkeeper tale.  I could do better.  Cemetery Dance has rejected better, written by me.  What gets me about short stories are their endings.  Novels need closure, we’ve spent so long with the characters, we would feel short changed with a cliff hanger.  In short stories that seems like the standard.  The monster kills, then wanders off…who knows what havoc it will wreak next?  It’s an interesting formula, or it was, before I read it six hundred times.  I’ve even been (very) guilty of writing it (more than once.)  I think people do it because they know they can get away with not giving a solid ending.

            This all being said, I think that I am more likely to be published in the short form than the long one.  I made a New Years Resolution to write a short story a month or twelve over the course of the year, and have written exactly two, one of which may never see the light of day.  So I guess I need to suck it up and read them, because that’s the only way I’ll write them better.  Here I go…

            It is possible that “The Autopsy”, by Michael Shea is my favorite short story.  The protagonist, Dr. Winters, who talks to his cancer, who means “to show courtesy to this uninvited guest” fascinated me from the moment he narrated his surroundings to it.  My first reaction was annoyance at his exposition, who talks like that, in real life, but that he was describing his surroundings to a disease, fascinated me.

            The story dribbles information through a torrent of description, we hear all about the town, what Dr. Winters looks like, what Craven looks like, and through all this we get little trickles that something is amiss.  A normal town at night…but why does Dr. Winters have body bags?  There is a need for a second autopsy, yet Craven and Dr. Winters ramble on about Dr. Parsons drinking problem.  The explosion comes out eventually, gradually, and also the missing persons.  “It is truly one of those Nightmare Specials that the good lord tortures lawmen with and hides the answers to forever” says Craven.

            This story has all sorts of great elements, the meteor shower which might have reached the ground, strange space robots, the sympathetic(ish) extra terrestrial traveler.  What I wanted to see happen was Dr. Winters teaming up with his cancer to fight the alien menace.  I wanted the cancer to come into play at the end, that the alien wouldn’t take him because of it, something like that.  Maybe the fact that he spoke to it hid the truth that it was another traveler, and the two could fight…  I rewrote the end to this story several times in my head.  I approve of Shea’s ending, but I think he could have done so much more with the cancer…

            So I wrote my own story.  About a woman who talks to her cancer, except her cancer crawls out of her stomach and kills people, and may or may not be just in her head. 

            Shea’s use of language (in addition to a killer plot) is what bumps the story up to excellence.  For example, when Craven and Dr. Winters are talking, they laugh: “Both men laughed, paused, and laughed again, some might have said immoderately.”  I love the tone here.  Speaking to the audience that way is risky, but I like it.  I find adverbs amusing, (which is why I tend to overuse them, I think) they add something when it feels as though they are used deliberately, and Shea uses them in abundance.  There’s certainly a different feel between “…’ he said angrily” and Shea’s adverbs, his are not there for lack of better words, they are carefully planned and meticulously placed.  (See what I did there?  Using the adverbs?)  I don’t know how Shea gets away with lines like “’Clever corpse ,’ the doctor cried. ‘Clever carnivorous corpse!  Able alien!’” which I feel would be struck from my book as fast as a crit partner could pick up a pen, but it works!

            The piece is legitimately scary, when Dr. Winters is hearing things as he is performing autopsies, I was actually afraid.  The characterizations are good, it’s gross, it’s everything I look for in a story.  I’m debating paying seventy dollars for a collection of his short stories on Amazon…

            As a child, eleven or twelve, maybe even ten, I  was an avid Stephen King fan.  I remember being excited to become a middle school student because the library was connected with the high school library, and there were Stephen King books in there.  I recall signing out Danse Macabre...and being bored to tears.  I hadn't yet discovered the box of yellowed paperbacks in the attic filled with books like Rosemary's Baby, the Omen, Harvest House, and more.  I had no frame of reference for the book, but I trudged dimly through it just so I could say I read it.

            After my first residency at Seton Hill, with about fifteen years of horror reading under my belt, I read it again.  I could read anything Mr. King writes, shopping lists, etc.  His tone when addressing the readers is comfortable, like a warm bath. 

            My favorite part of Danse Macabre is his treatment of modern horror fiction.  I have read most (but not all, not yet) of the books discussed here.  He pulls out some big guns for his list, Ghost Story, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Rosemary's Baby--I adore where King refers to the Exorcist as being a part of the Humorless Thudding Tract School of horror writing and hopes we never hear from Blatty again--Haunting of Hill House and more.                  

            During his chapter on Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney, King reflects that the STORY is what it's all about, and I absolutely believe in that.  He says of Moby Dick: "The story still remains--"This is what happened to Ishmael."  He goes on to say "...story, thank God, after a certain point becomes irreducible, mysterious, impervious to analysis."  In the section on Haunting of Hill House/House Next Door, King describes college and university professors as "lepidopterists of literature, who, when they see a lovely butterfly, feel that they should immediately run into the field with a net, catch it, kill it with a drop of chloroform, and mount it on a white board and put it in a glass case, where it will still be beautiful...and just as dead as horseshit."

            Academics, at times, lose sight of a powerful story when they focus their sights on structure, theme, mood, and style.  Most writers, at least the ones I like to read, don't set out to write a mood and wrap their tale to fit it, they start with a story...what happened to Ishmael?  Stephen King very kindly compares Masters Studies in English to the Emperor's new clothes, dealing with imaginary constructions that we pretend are there.

            Between Stephen King’s tone, his easy to read analysis peppered with curse words (I could read anything if it had curse words, I think) and the fascinating subject matter, as an adult I truly enjoy this book.  I want to read all the books he discusses, see all the movies, for a greater appreciation of his analysis. 

I’ve read William Peter Blatty’s 1971 classic The Exorcist a couple of times, and each time I am disappointed.  I don’t care about any of the characters.  Regan is a whiny brat, Chris is more interested in her career than being a parent, Kinderman comes off as a bumbling fool (he, at least, is redeemed in the sequel, Legion), Merrin is only in the book for about ten pages.  Karras is the only character that I have the slightest bit of interest in.  I don’t find the demon, Pazuzu (which would make an awesome cat name) to be that scary, but it is monstrous in the way it manipulates Regan’s personality.

When the book opens she is a normal, healthy eleven year old, in the opening chapter she is clutching a stuffed panda, a far cry from what she will become.  A grown adult wouldn’t move us the way a child, the symbol of innocence, moves us when it is transformed into a monster.  At first Chris thinks Regan is sick when she talks with Captain Howdy (maybe a pair of cats?  Pazuzu and Captain Howdy!) on the Ouija board, they put her on Ritalin, which half of today’s kids are on, and from there she escalates to peeing on rugs, murder, cursing and risqué activities with a crucifix.  Blatty’s prose is very dense.  He assaults us with words and images, take a peek at this sentence from where Karras meets Regan:

“Then his eyes locked, stunned, on the thing that was Regan, on the creature that was lying on its back on the bed, head propped against a pillow while eyes bulging wide in their hollow sockets shone with mad cunning and burning intelligence, with interest and with spite as they fixed upon his, as they watched him intently, seething in a face shaped into a skeletal, hideous mask of mind bending malevolence.”

That’s a sentence.  Yes, it shows us the horror of what Regan has become, it’s a scary image, but I feel so exhausted while I’m reading it that I don’t care.  Each section of the sentence is legitimately awful, the way he never really refers to the creature as Regan continues to build the horror, especially, giving it a sense of “other”-ness.  However, stacking that on the eyes, on the face bleeds away some of the impact.  If he let the thoughts have the space they deserve, then I would be more on board with the book.  The book seems to amble through the story in an almost stream of consciousness sort of a way.  I want immediacy in the description.

The plot of the book never seemed scary to me.  Yeah, the kid was possessed.  It never struck home in the way that some of the others have.  I didn’t empathize with her the way I did with Frank’s monster or the Beast Folk.  I was never concerned that she would live or die, I could take it either way.  (After all the drugs they pumped into her, I’m a little surprised she didn’t die from that.)  I think I even felt closer to the great Cthulhu than I did the characters in the Exorcist.  It would be an interesting exercise to try and write a piece about a mother with a possessed child in which I try and feel that empathy that this piece lacks.

I’m going to get some cats now…

            I’ve developed a new affection for the mystery genre, thanks to my Seton Hill classes.  This stems from the utmost respect I have for anyone who can pen an even passable mystery, as I can not plot my way out of a paper bag.  Any mystery more complex than a Scooby Doo episode sort of awes me.  I saw “Dog On It:  A Chet and Bernie Mystery” by Spencer Quinn on Amazon, then again at Barnes & Noble, and I figured I’d give it a shot.  Bernie is a down on his luck PI (a fresh, innovative concept) and Chet is his police dog academy flunk out canine companion with cute mismatched ears.  They are called upon to solve a missing persons case, a fifteen year old girl.  The father adamantly says she’s a runaway, but Bernie thinks that isn’t the case.  Add in a romance with a plucky, snoopy reporter, and the canine POV is really the only innovative part of the book.

            First off, the title.  I don’t think it’s cute.  “Dog On It”?  I have a soft spot for books from animal point of views when its done well, (“Three Bags Full” by Leonie Swann—though the mystery was totally the weakest link in that book) and that part of “Dog On It” was done well, minus some over the top cutesy-ness. 

            What the author did best was using the dog’s, Chet’s, point of view so that the audience knew more than the human protagonist did.  Chet can see and smell things that Bernie can’t, and it was fun to watch Bernie catch up with the rest of us.  Chet’s treatment of the back story was also interesting, since he would get distracted or forget details halfway through his descriptions, leaving us with sort of a puzzle to put together.  It left readers wanting more back story, never feeling inundated by it.

            As for the mystery, I had it all figured out pretty early on, between the clues Bernie saw and the clues Chet saw.  I’m pretty sure Quinn meant to do that, but I hate when I can figure out a mystery.  I like to be surprised at the end.  This book could have done with some more red herrings. 

            Quinn did a couple of things I really didn’t like.  There was a part where the dog was out of the blue contemplating how much he enjoyed going to the groomers, then two pages later the groomer showed up, and Bernie had “forgotten” he’d scheduled the appointment.  Chet said things like this were always happening to him.  Are they setting up canine telepathy for later books?  (The dust jacket promises that this isn’t the last we’ve heard of Chet and Bernie).  Seemed like a dumb coincidence to me, especially since the groomer taking the dog away made it so Bernie could be kidnapped.  The other thing that ate at me was that Chet had a lump on his back.  Several characters commented on it, I thought maybe it was a clue from a part where he’d been shot at, maybe there was a bullet in him and they’d use that to find the “perp,” or maybe he was dying of dog cancer, which would be very sad.  Instead, they ignored the lump, except when someone would mention it, which just made me more curious about it.  Maybe Chet has cancer in book two?

            I think this was a respectable, mediocre addition to the mystery genre.  Not much going on here that didn’t feel pretty well recycled, but I liked Chet’s voice when it didn’t get obnoxiously over the top.  I sure wish I hadn’t gotten the hardcover.

            I first read the Island of Dr. Moreau sometime in high school, probably in preparation of the 1996 Val Kilmer/Marlon Brando flop.  I loved Val Kilmer, and while I didn’t think the movie was particularly good, I enjoyed it.  Reading it again, particularly so soon after reading Frankenstein, got me thinking a great deal about monsters and the creation of monsters.  In both books, scientists created the monsters to satisfy their curiosity.  They weren’t looking to change the world; these were not cancer curing monsters.  These were both simple cases of “I wonder if this will work.”  Neither Moreau nor Frankenstein were prepared for their consequences.  Moreau, at least, didn’t run from his creations like a timid school girl, he stayed to face the Beast Men, to control them and teach them laws.  More than Frankenstein’s monster got, yes, but where was the compassion?  Moreau wanted to make an animal human, and it frustrated him that his creations always reverted back to their animal states.  Frankenstein’s monster acted perfectly human, it was polite, smart, and understanding, able to adapt to its environment, but because it wasn’t pretty no one gave it a chance.  The Beast Men are constantly battling inside themselves, striving to follow the laws, but the laws go against all their instincts. 

Not to go on all Fours; that is the law.  Are we not Men?

Not to suck up Drink; that is the law. Are we not Men?

Not to eat Flesh or Fish; that is the law. Are we not Men?

Not to Claw Bark of Trees; that is the law. Are we not Men?

Not to chase other Men; that is the law. Are we not Men?

Is this a response to the Victorian Era which was, if I am not mistaken, drawing to a close as Wells was writing?  This is an almost over the top satirical view of the repression of the period.  Animals just do all the things the laws prohibit.  There is no practical reason not to do these things, other than for the sake of being proper.  It’s just impractical, unless it is being used to constantly undermine the Beast Men’s sense of self, to keep them shaken up and unsure of their place in the world. 

 
Moreau had a pretty good handle on his menagerie until Prendick showed up.  Since they Moreau and Montgomery didn’t communicate what was going on there on the island, Prendick panicked, ran into the jungle, and showed the Beast Men that Man is not infallible.  They saw a Man bleed for the first time that day.  After that it all began to dissolve.  Frankenstein could have controlled his beast with a parental love, it wanted that, but he never gave it, and the creation was reduced to seeking attention the only way it could.  Frankenstein’s monster wanted the attention of its creator, the Beast Men only want to be left alone, to build dens and eat meat and walk on all fours.  They never wanted to think Big Thoughts.

Frankenstein’s monster never complained of physical pain, yet the Beast Men, as a result of the vivisection performed on them, lived in almost constant pain.  Living bodies will heal themselves as long as they are broken, and these Beast Men were certainly broken.  Moreau’s lab, his House of Pain, the punishment for all crimes, loomed over them as incentive to follow the law.  Perhaps Frankenstein’s monster didn’t feel pain because he was made of dead pieces?  He certainly felt pain on an intellectual level. 

The Beast Men had one another.  They had their own little community in the ravine, with their huts, they had mastery of fire, they had fruit and other food to eat.  Though they were in constant agony, they had a community.  Frankenstein’s monster wouldn’t have been a monster with a community.  I whole heartedly believe that if Victor had chosen to make the monster’s bride, the two would have gone to South America, and stayed hidden away from all other people.  (Though greed is human nature…would they have returned to their creator when they decided it was time for a child?)  Community did not save the Beast Men from revolting, but they were severely oppressed, and we have seen a thousand times that things will burst when pressure is put on them in that fashion.  They certainly went much longer than Frankenstein’s monster before they started killing.  It would be nice to read about an ungainly monster and people being nice to it.  It wouldn’t necessarily belong in the horror genre, but it would just be nice, wouldn’t it?

Random Victorian vivisection fact:  (I halfheartedly looked online for solid dates with which to back this up, but gave up.)   Great Britain’s first anti-animal cruelty laws went into effect before their child labor/child abuse laws.  (I believe this was shortly after the Island of Dr. Moreau was published in 1896.  Or maybe I am making all of this up.)