This paper looks at writings by the writer and colonial administrator Sarban (né John William Wall), who in a series of provocative 1950s-era texts fused the genre conventions of weird fiction with a peculiarly orientalist and fetishistic sensibility. I argue that this combination discloses a particular historical analysis and ideological critique of empire in the period of its decline. In particular, Sarban’s recurrent motif of the animalized human—the human transformed into an animal through eroticized scenes of technique and submission—indexes a critical perspective on the symbolic place of nature in Britain’s colonial imaginary. How do the “beasts” to which Sarban’s white British heroines are reduced symbolize the malleability and mortification of racializing reduction to the body or “flesh”—what does it mean when this animalized body is counter-historically racialized white—and what can Sarban’s invocation of the colonial discourse of the fetish (in both anthropological and Freudian senses) tell us about the symbolic relation of human and its Others (beast/slave/thing) under conditions of late empire? I explore these questions in a reading of Sarban’s “The King of the Lake.”