Status Updates From A Guerra dos Mundos

… I could see his staring eyes and gleams of light on his studs and watch chain. He vanished behind the mound, and for a moment there was silence. And then began a shrieking and a sustained and cheerful hooting from the Martians.”

Aliens sucking out people’s blood and feeding on it. Reading that without conditioning, decades of TV and movies, horror and SF? i bet that was scary, dude!

i bet this would really have freaked people out in 1897-1898?
“And suddenly I heard a yell, and saw a long tentacle reaching over the shoulder of the machine to the little cage that hunched upon its back...
He was a stout, ruddy, middle-aged man, well dressed; three days before, he must have been walking the world, a man of considerable consequence…