How does the author keep the reader gripped in "The Red Room" by H.G.Wells.

In 'The Red Room' the author keeps the reader gripped by involving the reader with the narrator's moods, atmospheres and senses that they share with the reader as well as contrasting settings and including unexpected happenings or settings that are unknown to the reader. A first example of this is when the author writes " I caught a glimpse of myself, abbreviated and broadened to an impossible sturdiness in the queer old mirror" This gives the image of the mirror being one of the many old things in the place and as the mirror distorts the narrator he looks ill-formed like the three strang…