The Invisible Man

I slipped the bolts of the front door quietly and went out into the street. I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.

A secrecy experiment turns into theft, exposure, and a failed reign of terror; Oxford Street liberation typifies the plot's turn from mystery to open pursuit, so plot scores 90.

I was wandering, mad with rage, naked, impotent. I could have murdered. And I saw you—"Lord!" said Mr. Marvel. "Here," I said, "is an outcast like myself. This is the man for me." So I turned back and came to you—you.

Griffin's escalating contempt is sharply opposed to practical witnesses, Marvel, and Kemp; his confession to Kemp frames the cast as moral collision not ensemble warmth, so cast scores 86.

And inside, in the artificial darkness of the parlour, into which only one thin jet of sunlight penetrated, the stranger, hungry we must suppose, and fearful, hidden in his uncomfortable hot wrappings, pored through his dark glasses upon his paper or chinked his dirty little bottles, and occasionally swore savagely at the boys, audible if invisible, outside the windows.

The Iping mystery gives way quickly to pursuit, disclosure, and a town-wide hunt; the shuttered parlour scene accelerates from puzzle to siege tempo, so pace scores 91.

But a fool of a cabman, standing outside a public house, made a sudden rush for this, and his extending fingers took me with excruciating violence under the ear. I let the whole down with a smash on the cabman, and then, with shouts and the clatter of feet about me, people coming out of shops, vehicles pulling up, I realised what I had done for myself.

Physical consequences—clothes, footprints, cold, hunger, and unseen blows—make the premise legible; the invisible body's collision with the visible world typifies Wells's tactile prose, so prose scores 92.

It was the finest of all possible Whit Mondays, and down the village street stood a row of nearly a dozen booths, a shooting gallery, and on the grass by the forge were three yellow and chocolate waggons and some picturesque strangers of both sexes putting up a cocoanut shy.

Small-town institutions and police improvisation convincingly absorb an impossible body; Iping's holiday fair grounds the invasion in concrete English village life, so world scores 92.

It was the fact that all his forehead above his blue glasses was covered by a white bandage, and that another covered his ears, leaving not a scrap of his face exposed excepting only his pink, peaked nose. This muffled and bandaged head was so unlike what she had anticipated, that for a moment she was rigid.

The muffled, goggled guest and the missing face create an immediate puzzle; Mrs. Hall's shock at the bandaged head is the novel's first locked-room mystery, so hook scores 94.

One could make an animal—a tissue—transparent! One could make it invisible! All except the pigments—I could be invisible! I said, suddenly realising what it meant to be an albino with such knowledge. It was overwhelming.

Treats invisibility as a social, bodily, and moral problem rather than a wish fulfilment; Griffin's laboratory breakthrough reframes the power as burden not fantasy, so innov scores 96.

And looking where she pointed, everyone saw, faint and transparent as though it was made of glass, so that veins and arteries and bones and nerves could be distinguished, the outline of a hand, a hand limp and prone. Presently they could see his crushed chest and his shoulders, and the dim outline of his drawn and battered features.

The corporeal body returns in death; the slow materialisation of Griffin's bruised young corpse closes the reign of terror while the stolen notebooks linger in the Epilogue, so ending scores 88.