HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds reviewed as if by Bram Stoker.
“Mr Wells’ latest literary effusion, unappealing, appals. Its few characters are lazy stereotypes. Defiantly-blinkered astronomer; vanquished soldier, compensating through unrealistic extravagant ambition; curate, developing religious mania... While I am no apologist for English army or clergy, here are men of straw indeed! The journalist ‘hero’ becomes despairingly suicidal, reflecting this novel’s hollow heart: self-flagellating defeatism!
The plot, clumsy as any moribund walking tripod, clanks heavily to its end. Sickeningly, Wells plays a ‘God on our side’ card, late in this game (deus ex microbia !); equivocating though: “To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future ordained.” (Evidently Martians do conquer Venus.)
Outrageously, one clumsily injected theme (blood predation) blatantly plagiarises my ‘Dracula’ published last year. Could Wells not devise some equally horrific, more plausible motivating predilection– perhaps, aliens harvesting specimens for experimentation à la Doctor Moreau ?
(I suggest this, gratis, for any future editions… pending legal action.)”
[Date references: Wells’ War of the Worlds, 1898;
Stoker’s Dracula, 1897; Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, 1896]
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