Goodness knows why - whether it's just the transitory nature of everything on earth - but the bright red ray (or, the ray of life, for other participants in the story) discovered by the brilliant zoologist, professor Persikov on a peaceful evening of April, 1928, while working on his microscope, shattered some of my peaceful evenings too. Based on my curriculum vitae, I can pretend not I've seen many thrillers, nor horror, or SF movies. That's because I wanted to have a better sleep or nice dreams during night time. However, there are two movies that in my mind, being deeply impressed and disturbed after finishing this short novella, are making a solid and profound bond with the most horror parts described in this story: The Birds by Hitchcock and Jaws. Of course, I have no intention whatsoever to watch again any of them. It was enough that they were rekindled in my imagination while I was being taken unawares by the dramatic flow of the story, which eventually it's nothing but a catastrophe caused by a combination of pure chance and human folly.
If I put aside the second half of the story, which got me horror-stricken, then the first part was really a joy to read. It reminded me fondly of the extremely popular prose writers Ilf and Petrov, two Soviet humorists that based their most famous works, The Twelve Chairs and The little golden Calf, also during the relatively liberal era in Soviet history, the New Economic Policy of the 1920.
If I would have been recommended this book as an early piece of science fiction, I am very certain it would not have passed my green light. However, as I heard of it under the description of a intriguing satire of the Soviet early times, and the dramatic consequences of the abuse of authority, knowledge and display of human folly, then nothing better to get me glued to its reading. It's definitely scaring that being driven by intellectual passion, some of us view their experiments in the purely scientific terms, untroubled by ethical considerations. Even if the man is capable of creating many modern wonders, the way everything is transformed into a grotesque nightmare, only serves to emphasize the thinness of distinction between animals and humans. ..I'm wondering if I'm going to have a bad dream tonight, h'm.