In his introduction, Christopher Priest considers the novel's impact upon modern literature.įor more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. This edition includes a full biographical essay on Wells, a further reading list and detailed notes on the text. The horror of his fate has affected his mind, however - and when Kemp refuses to help, Griffin resolves to wreak his revenge.

Forced from the village and driven to murder, he seeks the aid of his old friend Kemp. But the true reason for his disguise is far more chilling: he has developed a process that has made him invisible, and is locked in a struggle to discover the antidote. With his face swaddled in bandages, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses and his hands covered even indoors, Griffin - the new guest at The Coach and Horses - Is at first assumed to be a shy accident-victim. Wells's The Invisible Man is a riveting exploration of science's power to corrupt The Invisible Man (a.k.a.Depicting one man's transformation and descent into brutality, H.G.Instead, he asks her about getting his luggage from the railroad station.She tries to get him to talk about what happened (nosy much?), but he doesn't want to talk about his 'accident' with a gossipy innkeeper. Hall assumes that this guy was in an accident. Luckily, he's covered the lower part of his face with a serviette (a napkin), so she doesn't have to deal with what's there.The thick black hair, escaping as it could below and between the cross bandages, projected in curious tails and horns, giving him the strangest appearance conceivable. Ll his forehead above his blue glasses was covered by a white bandage, and another covered his ears, leaving not a scrap of his face exposed excepting only his pink, peaked nose. Hall is surprised by his appearance when she sees him in his room without his hat:

The stranger looks, well, strange, but he's got money, so Mrs.

At least one person says he looks like he's wearing a diving helmet (the old-fashioned kind, of course.) He's also wearing spectacles with sidelights, which basically look like goggles.

The stranger is totally covered, with only his shiny nose showing.

(If you've read War of the Worlds, you know that Wells often likes to set his stories in real, or real-ish, places, so it's no surprise that Iping is a real town in England.)

The book starts with a stranger arriving in a snowstorm at the Coach and Horses, an inn/bar in Iping.

The invisible man penguin