Showing results for "The Grotesque" in Science Fiction & Fantasy

A mysterious man, muffled to his blue-goggled eyes in hat and coat and gloves, arrives on foot at the village of Iping in the middle of a snowstorm, and takes up his residence at the local inn. Despite the Godsend of a paying guest in the middle of winter, the landlady and her husband are very soon much disquieted by the reclusive and increasingly abrasive traveller, and his strange 'researches' in the parlour...

In the ancient nerkshire town of gryme, a girl stands watching. She observes an old zookeeper approach and enter his dilapidated realm. She has been waiting for him. With a heavy heart, she recalls the joy and excitement of days gone by when, as a small child, she had been taken to the zoo by her father, to see the great wonders of the natural world. What awaits her now, however, is far from natural.…

The novel is the story of a scientist who, through the study of optics finds a way to make things invisible. In a desire for recognition, fame, and the advantages of being invisible, he subjects himself to the process. But being unseen isn't as positive as he had hoped, and he soon finds himself regretting his condition, and his mind also becomes warped. He becomes mentally unhinged. Later, he embraces his invisibility and begins to spiral into a lust for power and control, and he reveals a plan he has hatched to unleash his personal "terror" on the world.