Happy spooky season, Cullers! (Culltivators? Cullens? We’ll work on that.) Don’t look now, but Halloween night is just around the corner. It’s creeping closer every minute. It’s sneaking up behind you. It’s raising a knife? Watch out! It’s stabbing this extended metaphor! This joke has been done to death!
RIP joke. You may not have been funny, but at least you helped boost the overall word count.
We here at Culling the Classics have a long history of taking on scary stories for Halloween, from Dracula to Frankenstein to — oh, it’s only those two? Really? Okay, so a short history, but it’s getting longer. Wow, I’m really killing it with this intro. This is embarrassing. I wish I could just disappear…
The Book
The Invisible Man, by H.G Wells (C. Arthur Pearson [UK] / Edward Arnold [US], 1897)]
The Numbers
One of the most told, retold, and reimagined stories of the last century; inspiration behind literally countless films, television shows, plays, books, songs, and characters; the third straight Halloween CTC of a book that spawned a series of Universal Pictures horror films (total coincidence!); one of the earliest novels of the modern era to feature a fantastical element explained to have scientific origins; among the books that cemented its author as “the father of science fiction”; Goodreads rating of 3.63.
The Spoiler-Free Skinny
Jack Griffin arrives at a small country inn during a snowstorm and requests a room. He’s wearing a large hat, gloves, and a coat, which is all fairly normal for coming in from a storm. But as days pass, the innkeepers and local villagers come to realize that no one actually knows what Griffin looks like. He keeps to himself, refuses to allow anyone else into his room, and seems to have set up a makeshift laboratory for unspecified experiments.
The innkeepers are happy enough to leave their mysterious guest alone — until he falls behind on payments for the room and board. Griffin reveals to the landlady that he has succeeded in turning himself invisible by creating a serum that changes the refractive index of his body to the same as air. Unfortunately, he can’t figure out how to change himself back. After revealing his secret, he takes off all his clothes and runs away. Homicidal antics ensue.
You’ll Love It
The Invisible Man is a mystery, a thriller, and a sci-fi horror story all at the same time. It’s set mostly in a quaint village in the English countryside, where it’s easy for things to get out of hand quickly if there is a naked lunatic slinking around the place.
It is a bonkers story, but similar to other high concept works of the period by authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Jules Verne, this thing moves. There’s a lot of action among the science and sneaky social commentary.
The science isn’t totally disregarded, either. One of the important elements that sets this story apart from earlier works is the clear, logical, scientific process behind it. The method that Griffin employs to turn himself invisible is still fantastical, of course — but Wells goes to great lengths to explain the theory behind it all and be as accurate as possible, given the available knowledge of his day. This idea of exploiting the unknown frontiers of science, rather than falling back on magical or mystical explanations, was still relatively new at the end of the 19th century.
You’ll Loathe It
The Invisible Man attempts to be a mystery, a thriller, and a sci-fi horror story all at the same time. Folks looking for a bit more science and a bit less action — or vice versa — might stall out. The science fiction genre didn’t really exist prior to this period, so not all the kinks had been worked out yet.
At times, it feels very much inspired by the Gothic horror novels that preceded it. Works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde both introduce monsters with “scientific” origins, after all.
But the focus in these is much more on horror and the nature of good and evil. The Invisible Man seems to want to take this approach at times, but Wells’ story is not nearly as deep and thought-provoking as those other works. Wells opts to highlight the “science” instead, before devoting the story to an extended manhunt for the at-large Griffin.
There’s also this weird and VERY typical-for-its-time thing where it is revealed that Griffin is an albino, because of course no proper Victorian villain could ever just be terrible. There must be some kind of physical link to make it all make sense. In the post-Enlightenment era that birthed science fiction, where Logic and Reason permeate every facet of existence, a man can’t simply turn himself invisible for the fun of it.
Read It Or Leave It?
The only H.G. Wells work I had read before this was The Time Machine, which is basically “Hey, what happens if a guy happens to build a time machine?” So I was expecting The Invisible Man to be a bit more theoretical and experimental, like “Hey, what happens if a guy happens to find himself invisible?” I thought this would be a book of goofy scientific Victorian hijinks, maybe some pranks and unintended consequences, a bit of harmless adventure undertaken by a brave intellectual.
I did not think the answer to that question would be, “He turns into a homicidal maniac and terrorizes a small town.” (I did expect the main character to be naked the entire time, though! Which is admittedly a bit scandalous for the period.) Wishbone did a fantastic episode on The Time Machine. Wishbone absolutely could not do an episode on The Invisible Man.
It makes a lot more sense now why Alan Moore made Griffin such a terrible dude in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and why movies like 2000’s Hollow Man and 2020’s The Invisible Man are horror films: Griffin sucks. There’s some debate regarding whether he’s so awful before he turns invisible or because he turns invisible, but either way the commentary Wells is making on how humans behave when no one is watching is pretty bleak.
Griffin assumes that he can act with complete impunity, that being invisible effectively makes him invincible. It’s scary stuff. One of the reasons Wells is considered a “father of science fiction” is probably because he predicted how much technology could be abused — an evergreen theme in the genre to this day.
The Final Verdict
It’s worth pointing out that H.G. Wells didn’t exactly invent the concept of a character becoming invisible. What was “new” about this book was the idea of a character becoming invisible through scientific means rather than magical ones, and discussing these processes within the text.
That’s pretty cool, but not nearly as interesting today as it would have been at the time. Ultimately this is a fun book that I personally enjoyed, but it isn’t required reading. I didn’t loathe it like I did Dracula, and it’s not as deep and ponderous as Frankenstein.
All three are Really Important Books, but of the three, The Invisible Man is arguably the least important for folks to actually read. If you’re curious and enjoy Victorian-era stories, or if you’re a sci-fi completist, then go for it! But everyone else can probably pretend this book is as invisible as its main character.
About the author
Brian McGackin is the author of BROETRY (Quirk Books, 2011). He has a BA from Emerson College in Something Completely Unrelated To His Life Right Now, and a Masters in Poetry from USC. He enjoys Guinness, comic books, and Bruce Willis movies.
