Meat and Mould: The Weird Creatures of William Hope Hodgson and H. G. Wells

Abstract

Weird tales generated innovative animal monsters, in new, unknown shapes, defying familiar taxonomies, within the borderlands of nineteenth-century biological sciences. In H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and William Hope Hodgson’s “The Derelict” and “The Voice in the Night,” monstrous creatures are presented as real theoretical, if extreme, possibilities. Moreau’s Beast People and Hodgson’s mould and fungus creatures belong to terrestrial environments; they are weird, non-human life forms springing from the material potentiality of biological borderlands. The stories’ seas and islands are heterotopic spaces in which weird versions of reality can be constructed within the visible, known, material, physical world.