originally published in 1899
Aerie Books Ltd.
About my third Wells book. I also finished War of the Worlds and Island of Dr. Moreau. I'm sure I've read something else by him but I can't think of it, and can't look on my shelves because everything's packed.
Not a great cover, but cool how I got the flash to hit the table lamp on the cover.
General Notes
I'm surprised more than anything how the book reads more like literary slapstick. I read something with those qualities in graduate school for my Masters in Literature, but unfortunately I can't recall that short story, but I believe it was the same time period. Ironically, while The Invisible Man read like literary slapstick the horror elements are still pretty gruesome but more of a violent nature.
The pre-Lovecraft lovecraftian short story "The Damned Thing" by Ambrose Bierce also uses invisibility. Published in 1894 it precedes The Invisible Man by five years and some descriptions are similar but that's not necessarily evidence that Wells knew of Bierce's work, since there are only a few ways to describe invisible characters.
A narrator character slowly reveals himself, oftentimes very intrusively, but never introduces or reveals himself. He is obviously reporting all the incidents. The story starts in media res--in the middle.
Griffin (the invisible man) has three journals written in a cipher. These books still exist by the end of the book and should belong to a list of fake books, or even better, evil books like the Necronomicon. A list of evil books would be longer than a list of real sacred texts.
The invisible man is to visible people as visible people are to blind people.
"It was not until thirty years after the publication of The Time Machine that the genre gave up its earlier title of 'scientific romances'" (1 of foreword but not numbered).
In comparing Wells to Jules Verne the foreword author says Wells' "Speculative fiction dared to imagine 'what if...' rather than 'how'" (2 of foreword).
Mr. Marvel can see undigested food in the Invisible Man's body (51). The first time I saw this in a movie was Memoirs of an Invisible Man with Chevy Chase.
How to become invisible or How Griffin became invisible (102-114).
Griffin drinks strychnine as a tonic (110) and this may have led to his mental collapse (2 of afterword but not numbered). Though in my opinion he was kind of an asshole before the experiments, which I believe was the plot point of The Hollow Man if not Universal's The Invisible Man.
Reference to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (120).
Example of slow motion in fiction: "And as he did so the third window went with a snap like a pistol, hung starred for a moment, and collapsed in jagged, shivering triangles into the room" (156).
Comparison of The Invisible Man to Kafka's Metamorphosis by considering their main characters as antiheroes (2 of afterword but not numbered).
Etymology
Waggon is spelled thus and more than once. Is this how it was spelled then (15)?
"Butterfly money:" is this a common term or did Wells make it up (76)?
"'But I went to work--like a nigger'" (99). (I put this in for etymologists looking for the historical use of the term.)
"Detective" (119).
Evil/Fake Books
Griffin's three leather-bound experiment journals written in cipher.
Great Quotes
Describes people being thrown from a tavern/inn: "People down the village heard shouts and shrieks, and looking up the street saw the Coach and Horses violently firing out its humanity" 39.
Great Lines
"an unusually strange sort of stranger" (13).
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