Books like this are difficult for me to review. Normally, my criteria is “did I enjoy reading it? Did it bring me pleasure? Would I want to read it again?”. But with classics, things are different, in that one does not necessary pick them up because they are particularly fun, but rather, because of their contribution to the literature and fiction in general. These books are what put the foundation to the tropes we all know and recognize.

If it was a contemporary book, I probably wouldn't be interested in reading it. Still, as far as classics go, it is very fast-paced and readable, with no unnecessary digressions, irrelevant side characters and long depictions of pastoral nature. It is very much a kind of pulpy action.

The characters themselves are fairly 2-dimensional, and don't have much more to them than “the generic protagonist”, “the mad scientist” and “the alcoholic”. Not that they need to.

It is still a good exploration of the ethics of scientific work. Not that there was much exploration in this case. “Torturing animals and dumping them with callous disregard for what would happen to them is baaaad” is pretty much the only point seriously presented, so it was a fairly black and white issue. More interesting is the way the book discusses what does it mean to be human and what separates us from animals in the first place.