What to read after “The Invisible Man” by H. G. Wells: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
A respected London doctor is oddly close to a violent, mysterious man named Hyde. When a friend investigates the link between them, he uncovers a scientific experiment that set loose a darker self.
A scientific expedition to Antarctica discovers a mountain range, a frozen specimen and a ruined city older than humanity. As the team reconstructs the history of its builders, they realise the myths they dismissed were warnings, and something is still alive beneath the ice.
Eight ghost stories in which scholars and clergymen uncover things better left alone. An old manuscript, a whistled tune and a locked country house each hold a presence that follows the people who found it back into ordinary life.
Victor Frankenstein discovers the secret of life and assembles a living creature from the dead, then abandons it in horror. Lonely and rejected, the creature turns on its maker, and both are drawn into a cycle of guilt and vengeance.
A lonely young clerk who collects butterflies wins money and buys a country house, where he keeps the art student he has admired from afar as his prisoner. Told by both captor and captive, the novel traces the strange, uneasy months they spend together.
A strange, insect-like creature arrives in London bent on revenge against a member of Parliament, and its powers reach into the lives of everyone near him. The story is told through several witnesses who each encounter the being and try to stop it.
A meteor shower blinds most of humanity, leaving a few sighted survivors in a world where walking, venomous plants have escaped from farms. A young man and a small group try to reach safety and decide what kind of society can be rebuilt.
A collection of linked horror stories built around a forbidden play, The King in Yellow, that disturbs everyone who reads it. Around it are tales of artists, masks and a lake city where ordinary life slides, without warning, into dread.
One ordinary day, everyone in the English village of Midwich falls unconscious, and a barrier cuts the place off from the outside world. When the villagers wake, nothing seems wrong until the pregnancies begin. The children born months later are alike, golden-eyed and strangely powerful, and the village must decide what to do with them.
Edward Prendick is rescued from a shipwreck and left on a remote island owned by the physiologist Moreau. There he finds creatures that are part human and part beast, and learns what the doctor's experiments have made of them. A story about the cruelty people allow themselves in the name of knowledge.
Doctor Impossible, a supervillain with a genius intellect and a long record of failed world-conquest plots, escapes prison and tries again. Half of the story is his own account; the other follows Fatale, a cyborg new to a superhero team, as the heroes try to stop him and uncover what happened to their missing leader.
In the totalitarian superstate of Oceania, every thought and word is watched. Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting the past, until he starts a diary and a secret affair. His small rebellion against a system that controls reality itself slowly closes in around him.
Dana, a Black writer in 1976 California, is suddenly pulled back in time to a Maryland plantation, where she saves the life of a white boy named Rufus. Again and again she is dragged into the past, where she must survive slavery and protect Rufus to keep her own future alive.
Cylinders fall from Mars onto the English countryside, and the machines inside prove ruthlessly hostile. A student watches the invasion spread toward London as orderly Victorian society collapses around him.
Four women cross into Area X, a coastal region sealed off for decades, to survey it as the twelfth expedition. The biologist records the abandoned bunker, the writing on its walls and the animals that seem almost aware. She also knows her husband went in before her and came back changed.
On a remote Scottish island, sixteen-year-old Frank lives by strange rituals and guards family secrets. His routine shifts when his older brother escapes from a hospital and comes home, and the story Frank tells about himself begins to come apart.
A woman is confined to an upstairs room by her physician husband and told to rest. Cut off from work and company, she becomes fixated on the yellow wallpaper, convinced that a figure is trapped behind its pattern and that she must set it free.
In the Republic of Gilead, women have lost their names, jobs and freedom. Offred is a Handmaid, valued only for the child she may bear for a commander and his wife. Remembering the life she had before, she searches for small acts of defiance and a way to survive.
After her mother's death, Mary Yellan goes to live with her aunt at Jamaica Inn on the bleak Bodmin Moor. Her uncle keeps the inn closed to travellers and answers to dangerous men from the coast. Mary must work out what her one remaining family is hiding before the moor and its secrets close over her.
Eighteen-year-old Merricat lives with her sister and uncle in a large house outside a village that despises them, after the rest of the family died years earlier from poison. When a cousin arrives hoping to claim the estate, the careful order of Merricat's world is broken.
A scholar finds a manuscript telling of Melmoth, a man who centuries earlier traded his soul for knowledge and an unnaturally long life. Doomed to wander the earth, he appears to people in their worst moments and offers them the chance to take on his burden.
Ambrosio, a celebrated monk in Madrid, is admired for his apparent virtue until a novice leads him into pride, desire and crime. Around him runs the legend of a sorcerer, and the story follows the abbot's fall from purity into a bargain he cannot undo.
A Penguin Classics selection of Lovecraft's stories, from 'Dagon' and 'The Picture in the House' to 'The Call of Cthulhu', 'The Colour Out of Space' and 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'. Scholars, sailors and dreamers glimpse buried civilisations and vast indifferent forces, and the knowledge slowly takes their minds apart.
After her parents die, Emily St. Aubert is left to the care of an aunt who marries an Italian nobleman. Taken to the gloomy castle of Udolpho, she is surrounded by unexplained sounds, sealed rooms and sinister men, while she tries to keep her love and her safety.
Start with “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, “At the Mountains of Madness”, “Ghost Stories of an Antiquary”: they are the closest to “The Invisible Man” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “The Invisible Man” these are Mad Scientist, Forbidden Knowledge, Villain Protagonist), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Soon I Will Be Invincible”, “Annihilation”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
