A stranger swaddled in bandages and blue goggles takes a room at a country inn, works in furious secrecy, and loses his temper when the village won't leave him be — because under the wrappings there is no face at all. Wells follows Griffin, a brilliant, penniless scientist who has bleached himself out of visibility and can't find his way back, as the miracle curdles into a one-man reign of terror. A chase story with a physics problem at its heart, and the sharpest early study of what an ordinary man does the moment no one can watch him.