Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Prod Code #40339))

This is a great classic. This story brings to life the battle each one of us has within ourselves. Dr. Jekyll calls it his "dualtiy of purpose". The struggle of good versus evil; told in that colorful language of classics.

Most readers may be surprised at just how coy and evasive this short novel is. We get only fleeting images of the villain and his transgressions. For a work that has become so well knit into our cultural standards and mores, it's perhaps remarkable how little actually goes on.

You think you know the story. But what most people actually know is the 1936 movie starring Frederic March. Who Hyde is, his relationship to Jekyll, even how one becomes the other: all of these have been changed in every movie, TV, stage, and comic book adaptation ever made.

For what's reputedly a horror novel, this book is remarkably unscary. Maybe in 1886, when its ideas were new, it was terrifying. But now, when its core idea has become part of our culture, it's more thought-provoking than frightening. As Stevenson hints at dribs and drabs of Freudian, Darwinian, post-colonial, and other ideas that have become common coin, remember that he wrote before any of these were popular notions.

Start right in on the novel. Vladimir Nabokov's introductory essay states a lot that is obvious, and should be read only after the novel itself. On balance, Dan Chaon's afterword, about the novel's cultural impact, is probably more revelatory, and more accessible to general audiences.

Remember, this book is probably not what you think you know. It's at once more ambitious, yet far harder to pin down, than the cheapened versions in the mass media. It's smart yet understandable, familiar yet strange. It's the kind of book too few writers create these days.

Alright, so I've never read this book before (terrible I know). My Secret Santa bought me this book, along with a bunch of others, as my present and I finally had time to read it.

The plot is straightforward, starting off with a problem before gradually growing into heightened suspense that pulls and leaves hints all over the place towards the climax. Of course since this is a classic, much of the plot twists are already known to the well read, so it wasn't much of a shock, but it was interesting nonetheless. The metaphor/symbolism doesn't really show itself until the very end where it blazes loud and clear with the writer's subtle metaphors, or maybe not so subtle. It's written in 3rd omniescent, before the end where it switches over to 1st.

I actually like how the story revolved around two people investigating the actual main character of the book (or rather the person the story is about) versus it just being about the person and his descent into the clutches of evil. It was refreshing and gave every character their equal time in the spotlight. The themes of this book are very skillfully played through succinct prose. It wasn't overstated, nor written in a dense, complex way that makes the reader pause and think a bit more harder than needed. The writing was simple, direct, and to the point without being bogged down by excess descriptions or philosophical/political musings.

Another plus was that the chapters were very short, so this book is a super fast read, not to mention that it's only 54 pages long. I mean, if you can't sit down and read that, I don't know what else to say. Okay, sure perhaps the font is a wee bit too small, and there is a lot more semicolons in his sentences than any other story I've seen, but that shouldn't detract you. The only real section that tends to drag was the final chapter, which was from the perspective of Henry Jekyll. My mind started to wander a lot and I found myself skimming a lot of the passages. (Okay, so maybe I was tired and reading this around 1:30 in the morning) It's probably because there was such a great buildup to the climax and when we get to his chapter we're stuck reading about how he grew up and blah blah blah that wasn't directly attached with the ending. I mean, we want to know what happens, not how he was raised! By the middle of the chapter is when the real meat of the story comes to its conclusion and I had my eyes glued to every word, even though I had contemplated sleeping a few minutes earlier.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone who likes to read, and if you wanted to try some classics out, this would probably be the easiest of them to do.

This cheap Tor edition features a useless introduction by Charles Grant and an even more useless afterword by same. Other than that, it's just the bare text without any footnotes or annotations of any kind.

This book was fantastic with all of the suspense and all of the love. It was completely fabulous. And to think that all these years after Robert Louis Stevenson died that this book is still popular