Selected Stories of H. G. Wells by H. G. Wells

Author:H. G. Wells [Wells, H. G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780812970753
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 2003-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

HORROR STORIES

INTRODUCTION

Horror, as a genre, is enduringly popular both in fiction and film, maybe because we like the luxury of feeling real fear while knowing there’s no real cause for it—as if one could eat a whole hot fudge sundae and lick the spoon, knowing it was a pure, sugar-free, fat-free illusion. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a good period for horror stories, and Wells added his grue to the brew.

In “The Lord of the Dynamos,” the young H. G. Wells seems to be parading a bland conviction of white “civilized” superiority to vaguely “Asiatic” races, and he uses the word nigger in indirect discourse. If you stop reading at that word, you will miss the fact that the writer’s sympathy is with the black man, not the white one who beats him. It is not an agreeable story; it is crude, shocking, cynical, and powerful. There is a good deal of violence in Wells’s early work; both The Time Machine and The First Men in the Moon are full of grotesque and rather superfluous killings. At least the deaths in “The Lord of the Dynamos” are quite essential to the story. And I will attest that, having read the tale at ten years old or so, I have remembered poor Azuma-zi and the hum and throb of the dynamo for the next sixty.

I wanted to include “The Empire of the Ants,” not because it’s a very good story, but because it’s so clearly an ancestor of so many movies about unpleasant insects with imperialistic ambitions. But there wasn’t room for both it and “The Valley of Spiders,” and the latter tale seemed more truly imaginative. It is boldly told, throwing us together with men whose motives and passions we must guess at, in a strange, cobwebby landscape.

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