taylorklong's profile picture

taylorklong 's review for:

The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
3.0

The plot is essentially the title with The Invisible Man - there's a man and he's invisible! We learn how that came to be, and the reasoning and ramifications for this development.

This is my first experience with Wells and I was enjoying it through the first half, which thrusts us into the middle of the invisible man's story. However, it begins to lag at the mid-point, where Wells uses my least favorite narrative device from the time period, which is that Person A and Person B meet halfway through Person A's story and Person A narrates his origin story to Person B. Frankenstein employed this same method, and it drove me crazy there, and still did here, despite the fact that Wells' writing style is more my speed. Once we passed through flashback city, the story picked up again, but I couldn't get back into it as ardently as I had been in the first half after losing steam.

I found Wells' writing surprisingly charming, and at times darkly funny, which I didn't anticipate. Honestly, I think he could've just as easily passed this off as a dark comedy and I'd love to see a modern film reinterpretation done in that fashion.
SpoilerThe plot of the story is: man thinks being invisible would be awesome, turns out he didn't totally think that through. For real, it became kind of funny how poorly thought-out this idea was.
Though the execution wasn't completely effective, the concept and writing style is enough for me to pick up more Wells down the line.