The Invisible Man

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The Invisible Man

H. G. Wells

Fantasy & Science Fiction

Aug 23, 2018

“My fantastic stories,” Wells once wrote, “do not pretend to deal with possible things. They aim indeed only at the same amount of conviction as one gets in a gripping good dream.” That’s certainly an accurate description of the target hit by The Invisible Man—although, by the end of the book, deliciously entertaining as it is, the word “nightmare” might seem more appropriate than “dream.” Who hasn’t imagined what it would be like to roam the world unseen? Like Griffin, the protagonist of Wells’s story, we find it easy to imagine “all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom.” Also like him—“Drawbacks I saw none”—we are apt to underestimate the downside. Yet drawbacks there are, from the annoyance of pursuing dogs who can still discern his scent to the futility of his physical desires. After the initial exhilaration of its novelty wears off, Griffin’s invisibility grows from liability to curse, while the author shapes a plot that elaborates the clever conceit of an invisible man into a crackerjack cautionary tale of grim and desperate horror.

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Jane Huttner

Jul 7, 2020

A very interesting book. I initially thought Griffen was just looking to cure himself. Then he starts stealing. Then he reaches Kemp and all the things he tells him get worse and worse til you think he should be put in prison for life. I liked the ending--that they caught him and he turned visible

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