The War of the Worlds

A man in Woking hires a dog cart from a local innkeeper for two pounds and promises to have it back by midnight. He drives his wife twelve miles to Leatherhead, then turns the horse around to keep his word, and that promise is what separates them for the rest of the story. Behind him, on Horsell Common, a cylinder thirty yards across has finished unscrewing itself, and the men who walked out to it with a white flag have their answer.

He tells it as a suburban householder would — the price of the cart, the smell of hay, the neighbours laughing at him over a garden gate — while the heat-ray, the Black Smoke and the hundred-foot tripods empty London behind him. Every alien invasion since works from this pattern.