Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters Read Online Free PDF Page A

narcissist’s solitude? I’d been drawn to Kay the way insects singled out the younger shoots or leaves not yet toughened or toxic. I’d added nothing but judgment and violence to the world. If their law, like the lagoon’s, was grim and casual, they at least took what they found and tried to make the best of it.
    So they liked to disassemble their surroundings, and tinker with them. Was it such a shame that they didn’t save all the parts?
    Once in the water I sank to my knees down a slope, the muck giving way in clouds. I was happy they’d turned me out. I was rooting against me. I was less their shadow side than an oafish variant on a theme. Extinction was pouring over me like a warm flood, history swirling and eddying one last time before moving on, and I was like the pain of a needle frond in the foot: I filled the moment entirely, and then vanished.

After Moreau
Jeffrey Ford
    I, Hippopotamus Man, can say without question that Moreau was a total asshole. Wells at least got that part right, but the rest of the story he told all wrong. He makes it seem like the Doctor was about trying to turn beasts into humans. The writer must have heard about it third-hand from some guy who knew a guy who knew something about the guy who escaped the island by raft. In fact, we were people first before we were kidnapped and brought to the island. I was living in a little town, Daysue City, on the coast in California. Sleepy doesn’t half describe it. I owned the local hardware store, had a wife and two kids. One night I took my dog for a walk down by the sea, and as we passed along the trail through the woods, I was jumped from behind and hit on the head. I woke in a cage in the hold of a ship.
    People from all over the place wound up on the island. Dog Girl was originally from the Bronx, Monkey Man Number Two was from Miami, and they snatched Bird Boy, in broad daylight, from a public beach in North Carolina. We all went through Moreau’s horrifying course of injections together. The stuff was an angry wasp in the vein, and bloated me with putrid gases, made my brain itch unbearably. Still, I can’t say I suffered more than the others. Forget House of Pain, it was more like a city block. When you wake from a deep, feverish sleep and find your mouth has become a beak, your hand a talon, it’s terrifying. A scream comes forth as a bleat, a roar, a chirp. You can’t conceive of it, because it’s not make believe.
    Go ahead, pet my snout, but watch the tusks. No one wants the impossible. What human part of us remained didn’t want it either. It was a rough transition, coming to terms with the animal, but we helped each other. After we had time to settle into our hides, so to speak, there were some good times in the jungle. Moreau could only jab so many needles in your ass in a week, so the rest of the time we roamed the island. There was a lot of fucking too. I’ll never forget the sight of Caribou Woman and Skunk Man going at it on the beach, beneath the bright island sun. The only way I can describe it is by using a quote I remember from my school days, from Coleridge about metaphor, “the reconciliation of opposites.” I know, it means nothing to you.
    We all talked a lot and for some reason continued to understand each other. Everybody was pretty reasonable about getting along, and some of the smarter ones like Fish Guy helped to develop a general philosophy for the community of survivors. The Seven Precepts are simple and make perfect sense. I’ll list them, but before I do I want to point something out. Keep in mind what it states in the list below and then compare that to the dark, twisted version that appears in Laughton’s film version of the Wells novel, Island of Lost Souls . Monkey Man Number One and a couple of the others took the boat to Frisco, and by dark of night robbed a Macy’s. One of the things they brought back was a projector and an 8-millimeter version of the flick. I believe it’s Bela Lugosi who