The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau

Two of Wells's early novels about what science does to the man who practises it. Griffin, in The Invisible Man (1897), arrives bandaged at a Sussex inn and cannot make himself seen again; Moreau, on his island (1896), cuts animals into the shapes of men and teaches them the Law. Both books are about the same thing — knowledge without anyone to answer to — and both end badly for the knower. Ninety-nine plates, from Constable's cloud studies to Munch's coastal landscapes, run alongside these tales of men who overreach and vanish.