This is Halloween(?): The Invisible Man

For my second horror read of the season, I chose another H.G. Wells classic I hadn't read before: The Invisible Man.

First, I was always under the wrong impression; this book is not a horror story. Honestly, I don't know what I expected. The Claude Rains film of 1933 is usually grouped with the other Universal Horror films, and while I never thought that film was scary, I figured the book was likely to be so. But nope.

A sizable chunk of the book reads much like a comedy. Wells spends a good portion of the book describing the provincial and silly folk among whom the titular character finds himself. These rather gentle bumpkins take a good bit of verbal abuse and other rude behavior from the Invisible Man, and there is some slapstick and general comedic mayhem as they try to figure out just what the oddly-dressed stranger among them has going on. It seems very meandering to me, as though Wells didn't quite know where to take the story.

Eventually, though, the narrative takes a turn to the sinister as the Invisible Man, whom we learn is named Griffin, has to flee the little town he was staying in. He chances upon and consequently terrorizes a hobo into doing his bidding. It starts out fairly light-hearted, with the two moving around the countryside and going back to the town to retrieve Griffin's notebooks. It goes downhill when the tramp decides (almost inexplicably, really) to steal the books and run off.

This leads to what passes for an antagonist to the Invisible Man, and the closest the reader gets to a hero in the story. Kemp, an old schoolmate of Griffin, just happens to live near where the tramp flees, and after a few coincidences that seem to me as though Wells wanted to hand-wave past some gaps in his narrative, Griffin holes up in Kemp's house.

We learn how Griffin came upon his discovery of the secret to invisibility in a sizable flashback to London of a few months earlier. We see him experimenting on wool, a cat, and himself, after which he mails off his notebooks to retrieve later, then sets fire to the boarding house he lives in to destroy all evidence of his experiments. Seems precipitous to me, seeing as how it's snowing out and he's stark naked. He tries to steal from a department store, fails, then robs a costume shop. There are some interesting moments interspersed throughout, with Wells dealing with some implications of being invisible - dirt and snow can reveal him, and an invisible person has to be constantly watching out for other people, animals, and vehicles when in a crowded area. It's interesting, but after a while the narrative seems to be meandering again.

In the present, Griffin begins laying out his plans for a reign of terror, with Kemp as his partner. It seems ludicrous, really, because even an invisible man is just one guy, and has to run around naked, to boot. Maybe that was Wells' point; all along, he has painted Griffin as hot-tempered, arrogant, and prone to acting before thinking. He's also a psychopath; he describes how he robbed from his father to pay for his experiments, and the money turns out not to be his father's. The old man commits suicide, and Griffin cold-bloodedly brushes the whole thing off. Along with a murder (possibly two; the costume shop owner he robbed he knocked out, and may well have killed him), it's pretty good evidence this guy is a jackass of the highest order. So while it's plausible that he would want to start a one-(invisible)-man reign of terror, it still seems kind of stupid that he thought that was any kind of plan.

Kemp, meanwhile, has been biding time. He let the law know the invisible man was in his house, but after a typically clumsy attempt at capturing the villain, he's back on the loose. Griffin besieges the house, shoots a cop, breaks out all the windows, and generally misbehaves until he actually makes it into the house. Kemp hot-foots it away, and after a general running brouhaha, Griffin is dogpiled and beaten to death.

Then we get an epilogue where the tramp, years later, is a successful innkeeper. Denying the invisible man's notebooks were still in his possession, we get a special moment where he drags them out of hiding to read at night. 

Well then.

All in all, while the book is readable, it seems very scatterbrained. I usually read with the intent of sussing out what deeper meaning the author was trying to convey, but to tell the truth, I couldn't really dredge up much of anything here besides obvious stuff like being a jackass can be exacerbated by having an advantage no one else has. If anyone else can point me to some subtext, I'm more than happy to read about it.

This Is Halloween: The War of the Worlds

Every year, I celebrate the Halloween season by reading classic works of horror throughout October. This year, I decided to write about some of them. First up: H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.

It's tough to overstate just how important H.G. Wells is in the genesis of science fiction. His work established some of the most long-lasting and recognizable tropes in the genre. The War of the Worlds is almost certainly his best-known work, and its influence in popular culture is so pervasive that the basic premise of the story, and, perhaps, its plot as well, is familiar to most people in Western culture. Its only real rival would be The Time Machine, and I would be willing to bet that fewer people in our culture could rattle off the basic plot to it as they could that of The War of the Worlds. But my point remains: everyone has heard of these two books, and their basic elements continue to be used again and again in pop culture. And they aren't the only two books he wrote in the genre, not by a long shot. But The War of the Worlds towers above the rest.

So that's why even I'm surprised at how long it took me to finally sit down and read it.

The basic plot: meteors strike the Earth in various places near the city of London, and are soon revealed to be conveyances for an invading force from the planet Mars. The resulting "war" quickly proves to be a rout, with humanity finding itself almost completely helpless to turn back the invasion.

Similar to The Time Machine, the protagonist here is unnamed. Wells does a creditable job of making his narrator both a blank slate upon which the reader can project themselves, and an actual character with a definite personality. Through him, we witness the explosions on Mars, seen via telescope, that heralded the arrival of the Martians some time later, and their subsequent attempts to secure the Earth as their own.

Two things struck me immediately about Wells' tale: one, he makes his Martians ("alien" and "extraterrestrial" had not become common terms for creatures from other planets yet) truly alien, and two, they actually begin terraforming (or, really, "aresforming") Earth to be more easily habitable for them. Given the time period and almost complete lack of precedence for either at the time (1895), the fact that Wells included both concepts in the same book is stunning.

Wells' pacing and his narrator's viewpoints places the reader near the action and distant from it in turns, until there is almost a hypnotic tone to the story. Or, a better way to put it is there is a nightmarish quality, where events are beyond the reader's ability to change or comprehend, like the coming of a sudden violent storm.

So what was Wells getting at, specifically? Placing the book in context makes it obvious. The British Empire bestrode the world, dominant for centuries. Like the Martians, it could come and go as it would into any part of the world, its own agenda paramount. Wells was making some sharp societal observations about his nation.

The Martians are implacable and irresistible, their great metal tripodal machines striding the countryside and cities like colossi - not like; they are colossi. When humans prove troublesome, the Martians simply lay down clouds of killing gas, like an exterminator might fumigate a house for rats. There is an air of doom, in the sense of the word as fate, or judgment, here meted out by an uncaring universe rather than a divine hand. And what sins are being punished? One, above all: hubris. Man had come to see himself as the ruler of his planet, and, by assumption, the universe. The Martians were simply an instrument of the universe, sent to disabuse humans of their presumption.

Certainly the Martians were felled by simple organisms (I won't even SPOILER ALERT that; who doesn't know this about the story?), ones that Man himself could easily resist. Yet are not countless humans killed by diseases everyday, diseases that elude even our best science? In the end, Wells' conclusion was one that could apply to any empire, in any time: even the greatest of human powers is still subject to the world around it, helpless before the whims and onslaughts of time or chance or even the most humble forms of life on his own planet. Our greatest folly is to believe we control the destiny of everything around us; at best, we exert some control over our own actions.

I would have ended on that somber, high-falutin' note, but there was something else I wanted to add. Wells' story is a pretty good tale of terror. Like Godzilla some 60 years later, the giant Martian machines run over and through anything in their way, heat rays crisping any who don't flee. It isn't an adventure tale, by any means; no heroes show up to save the day. But for a glorious moment, Wells gives us a glimpse of a story that might have been just that heroic: the attack by the Royal Navy's torpedo ram ship, the Thunder Child. The Thunder Child charges into the fray, intercepting the Martians that have waded out into the English Channel to destroy the fleet of ships desperately carrying refugees to the continent. Ramming first one tripod and then another, the doomed ship  manages to evoke a bit of hope before it meets its fate. It's a thrilling sequence.

The War of the Worlds is a true classic. The power of the narrative makes it obvious to me why it has endured for well over a century. In its time, there couldn't have been anything else remotely like it. It's hard to imagine what science fiction, or even pop culture in general, would have looked like without it. It's also far ahead of its time; it would be decades before science fiction could match it again for its literary and intellectual quality. In fact, it reads better and more logically than a lot of science fiction I've read from the 1920s and 1930s. A great book I should have read years ago.