The Island of Doctor Moreau

A shipwrecked man is taken in on an island where a surgeon works nights and the servants do not walk quite right. Wells wrote it a year after The Time Machine, at the height of the anti-vivisection quarrel, and reviewers called it disgusting; he later called it an exercise in youthful blasphemy. The Law the beast-folk recite is the coldest thing in the book. Sixty moonlit plates by painters including Aivazovsky and Joseph Heard carry the castaway's night sea and its lonely coasts through the whole volume.