"Alone- it is wonderful how little a man can do alone!"

He dreams of a reign of terror! A reign of terror, I tell you. You must set a watch on trains and roads and shipping. The garrison must help. You must wire for help.

I've had a love for reading as long as I can remember. I loved it and was good at it, and as a result I sometimes read books that were not meant for children. Curiously, while I remember reading content that I could recognize as inappropriate, I don't remember ever being frightened by a book in the same way movies could frighten me.

Until I read The Invisible Man.

Of all things, this slim little novel published in 1898 (almost exactly 100 years before I read it!) scared the pants off of me. I think I had a nightmare or two, and I was jumpy when walking around the house alone. And let's not even mention the feelings I had if I had to get out of bed during the night!

I reread this little book in high school, trying to discover what about it had been so terrifying. It wasn't aggressively gory; there wasn't any sort of intense atmosphere; there weren't ghosts or reanimated corpses or anything like that.

What there is is a lot of psychological terror. The titular man, Griffin, is a selfish egomaniac even before his transformation, and afterwards he is quite, quite mad. So what you get as the reader is a sense of terror on two fronts. You have the fear of the villagers who are being robbed, murdered, and terrorized by a man they can't see. I have a vivd recollection of one terrified man begging to be locked in a police cell to be safe from the invisible madman.

And then there's the horror of the invisible man himself, hunted and hated.

"And you must prevent him from eating or sleeping; day and night the country must be astir for him. Food must be locked up and secured, all food, so that he will have to break his way to it. The houses everywhere must be barred against him. Heaven send us cold nights and rain! The whole countryside must begin hunting and keep hunting."

His invisibility can only be maintained when he is completely bare and empty. Food can be seen digesting, clothing shows, he can leave blood trails. The authorities know this, and they exploit it in their hunt for him.