Don’t groan. It really was. Booming thunder, swirling fog, blazing flashes of lightning, sporThis is an origin story.
It was a dark and stormy night.
Don’t groan. It really was. Booming thunder, swirling fog, blazing flashes of lightning, sporadic torrential rain, the whole frilling works. I walked down an alley looking for a place to piss, away from the discordant songs of the drunks who were staggering their way down the streets in zombiesque fashion. I finally found a likely place beside a battered dumpster full of rotting vegetables and squirming rats. A snootful of the redolent air was enough to clear my head of the Scottish spirits who had taken up habitation in the hallways of my mind. Clarity was not what I had in mind.
I’d just finished a pub crawl along Rose Street, and I was swimming in what felt like a gallon of smoky highland scotch. The old tried and true rule applied, what goes in must come out, and the curses floating upwards from my bladder were laced with fire and brimstone of Biblical proportions. I took a righteous long piss, one of those that went on so long I had to lean against the sooty brick to rest a wee moment, and that is when I spotted a bit of glint between two cobblestones.
Now you might say to yourself, I thought you said it was a dark and stormy night? I did, and it was, but I did say there was lightning, didn’t I? This particular flash of lightning threw enough sizzle into the nooks and crannies of the alley to highlight with some splendor that particular piece of tempting gold.
I gave the lizard a shake, knowing that no matter how diligently I cleared the shaft at least two drops of aureate liquor would still plop into my skivvies. I gave a glance up and down the alley, not that I knew which way was up or down. The bleak light from the street lamps at each end of the alley did little to help me determine if anything, creature or otherwise, was stirring. My eyes were lured away from canvassing for potential trouble back to the allure of the gold. It was probably just a crumpled gold foil from a candy bar, I told myself, but that part of me that still believed in magical moments was assuring me…it’s gold you fool!
I crab walked over to it, which kept me steadier on my inebriated pins. I leaned over, and the moment my fingers wrapped around the edges, I knew it was a coin, and when I pulled it up to my eyes, another flash of lightning revealed the youthful head of Queen Victoria looking rather ravishing, or maybe she was just more beautiful emblazoned on a gold sovereign. I kissed her rain dappled cheek and thought to myself, $500, or maybe as much as $800 if it were a more collectible year. I looked at the date---1850. Nothing significant came to mind except for the fact that it was the year Robert Louis Stevenson was born. A coin from the year of his birth found right here in the city of his birth…Edinburgh.
I barely had time to celebrate this lucky find when something slammed into me hard enough to take me completely off my feet. When I landed heavily on the cobblestones, the air was driven from my lungs, and the coin danced away from my fingers, spun for a moment on the stone street before landing just beyond my outstretched fingers in a puddle of water.
A dark, round figure with hairy knuckles plucked the coin from the puddle. He held it up to his fat lips, kissed it, and then deftly tucked it into a small pocket on his vest. He leaned over, breathing into my face the scent of earth and the heady stir of pungent spices. I was gasping, but no air had found passage back into my lungs yet. “Were you going to steal my precious?” he bellowed. He squinted at me with one vivid green eye and then the other. His raspy voice rattled my ears, sounding like chunks of iron ore rattling around in a tin can. “Keeten is it? I’ve had my eye on you. A tragic, gothic figure, too skinny, too tall, too self-centered. A layabout, a fornicator, a drunkard, a scribbler.”
He grabbed the lapels of my jacket and gave me a good shake. In the course of my head snapping backwards and forwards, a mouthful of air finally trickled down to my lungs, and as foul as this alley infused air was, it still was ambrosia to my oxygen starved lungs. “I’m…,” I managed to gasp before he slapped me hard enough that the sound popped like thunder into the swirling storm above. He thumped my head to the street and proceeded to put the boots to me with his square-toed shoes. I felt my ribs bend without quite breaking and my flesh bruising purple flowers with every kick of his feet. He walked away for a moment, maybe to catch his breath, before striding back to me. As he raised his foot for one last kick that would have punted my balls over the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle, he stopped and sighed.
“I’m going to give you a chance to redeem yourself.”
I wasn’t really sure what I’d done, but I nodded vigorously as I curled myself up in a ball, unsure of which aching part of myself to rub first. He squatted beside my head and said, “Not enough people are reading the classic gothic horror novels.”
My mind churned. He wanted to discuss literature?
“Aye, I do,” he said, as if he could read my mind. He stuck a square, blunt finger in my face. “You are going to use what influence you have to get people to believe in mythical creatures again, to be terrified again, and to breathe life back into the old tales of horror.”
“I don’t think…,” I tried to say, but he interrupted me. “That Stevenson lad was a bit of a gadabout before I had me a talk with him.”
I looked at him with amazement.
“Oh aye, Robert and I go way back. One dark night when he was about six, I made him pee himself, but that was only me priming the pump. When he was about seventeen, preening around town in his velvet jacket, I gave him a good thumping and explained that much more was expected from him. I didn’t shape the terrors in his mind for him to waste my time with his frivolous pursuits of pleasure. I told him to put pen to paper and bring to life my cousin Jekyll, and more importantly my soul incarnate, Hyde.”
“You are absolutely full of shite,” I managed to hoarsely whisper, which earned me another flurry of smacking boots against my tender flesh.
“Okay, okay,” I screamed.
He squatted back down by my face with a satisfied smirk on his face. “You will write new introductions to the classic horror books, starting with The Casebook of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
“I’m not your man.”
“You are. I will make it so.”
“But no one will care if I do this.”
“They will, or they’ll get a visit from me.”
“You’re a Brownie?”
He grimaced. “I prefer the term hobgoblin. I’ve kind of grown beyond the mundane house chores. I like to think I influence history in my own little way now.” He squinted at me with one eye again. “Do we have an understanding, Mr. Keeten?” His voice, slightly breathless from his exertions, sounded more than ever like the raspy squawk of Arthur Shelby from Peaky Blinders.
I groaned, “We do.”
“Alright then.” And with that final confirmation of our deal he vanished as if he’d never existed.
Next morning I was tenderly walking across the floor of my hotel room when my phone rang.
David Yurkovich’s voice, laced with pain, asked me, “So, Keeten, would you be interested in writing introductions for a series of classic horror books for Gravelight Press?”
“Yes,” I muttered. Then thinking of the hobgoblin, I said brightly, “Of course, I’d be thrilled for the opportunity.”
“Thank goodness,” I heard him whisper.
“Did you get a visit from a squat, fat man?”
“Oh yes, with the hands of Mike Tyson and the feet of Ernesto Hoost.”
“That’s the guy. Well, I hope people buy copies or he said he was going to give them each a visit, and as you and I know, they don’t want a visit from this particular hobgoblin.”
“They’ll love your intros, Keeten. Don’t worry, they’ll buy,” David reassured me.
To save yourself some harassment from the hobgoblin, please do purchase the Gravelight Press version of The Casebook of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and read my scintillating introduction, The Book That Burned. The Stevenson short story “Markheim” is included as bonus content and pairs perfectly with the diabolical novella.
I signed a thirteen book contract with Gravelight Press, so there will be at least twelve more entries in the series. If the series does prove to be popular, we will continue to expand the portfolio beyond the original thirteen. Next up will be The Picture of Dorian Gray, followed by Frankenstein. We already have the cover art designed for the next two, and as you can see, the designs of these collectible volumes match and will look fantastic on your bookshelves.
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”My strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face w”My strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her; and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, ‘You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever.’”
This was quite the encounter for our protagonist. Living on her grand estate in the Austrian countryside, Laura has never experienced lust, not even the conventional attentions of a man involving a dark alcove with heavy panting, groping hands, and a thrusting wine drenched tongue. She’s taken aback by the aggressive attention of her new friend Carmilla, and this wellspring of passion doesn’t seem right, yet she is flattered by the attention of this beautiful, beguiling, and mysterious woman.
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”’Poe really anticipated the feel of our own time, even more than Twain did,’ he said. ‘Poe is alive to our culture today and to readers today in ways”’Poe really anticipated the feel of our own time, even more than Twain did,’ he said. ‘Poe is alive to our culture today and to readers today in ways that he wasn’t alive to readers in his lifetime. Poe was so far ahead of his own time in terms of intuiting changes that were already happening in the culture. And a lot of that has to do with atrocities of the twentieth century: the Holocaust, the terrible wars, the inventions of mass destruction. We are now properly in a place where Poe resonates. A reader in the 2020s instantly understands “The Masque of the Red Death” and gets the sense of entrapment and fatality and the claustrophobic effect that Poe creates.’”----J. Gerald Kennedy
Edgar Allan Poe died October 7th, 1849, and Robert Louis Stevenson was born November 13th, 1850. Talk about two ships passing in the night, ghost ships with tattered sails, dangling anchor chains, and battered hulls. If one believes in mystical things, there was a passing of the torch when one was buried and the other born. I have a cosmic connection with both writers. I share a birthday with Poe, and my father shares a birthday with Stevenson. The book that made me a lifetime reader was Treasure Island, and reading Stevenson led me to Poe. I have lived with numerous misconceptions about both writers for most of my life, but over the decades, researchers have sifted through the legends of these men, and despite the mounds of fragmented and misleading “evidence,” scholars are beginning to unravel some of the truth from the misconceptions.
Poe was buried quickly, too quick for his closest friends and family to attend his funeral. Poe’s remains reside in Baltimore. Stevenson is buried on the island of Samoa. Both are entombed beneath monuments, and access to what is left of their corpses to discover more about their deaths is probably never going to happen. We have much more reliable data on Stevenson than we do Poe; some of that is because of Stevenson being a generation younger, and he was surrounded by more reliable witnesses when he died. Poe passed away in a hospital surrounded by people who didn’t even know him. A few of those attending him knew of him. Unfortunately, given his reputation for gothic prose and high drama, his final mutterings were muddied by the literary elaboration by those who witnessed his final days.
Poe was dead at 40. Stevenson was dead at 44. What wonders would have emerged from their pens if they had lived normal life spans?
Mark Dawidziak wrote a book about Poe, so why am I writing about Stevenson? Well, because I can’t think about Poe without thinking about Stevenson and vice versa, and if you are a fan of one, you will probably be a fan of the other. Regardless, I will set Stevenson aside and focus on Poe.
Poe sought comfort and stability his whole life, but because of bad luck, an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, the possession of a witty and barbed tongue which often made him enemies he could ill afford, and a propensity to be attracted to doomed women, he never achieved financial security. His fabulous poem, “The Raven” (1845), brought him fame, but he saw very little profit from it. He was so distinctive looking, even in his threadbare clothes, a disparate pairing that was often a shock for people who recognized him.
We could say he was cursed from the beginning. His mother, a well-regarded stage actress, died at twenty-four. His father, a less well-regarded actor, also died, effectively orphaning Poe and his two siblings, in a matter of days. Edgar was taken in by Richmond merchant John Allan. Given Dawidziak’s suppositions, this leads me to speculate, if his mother had lived a normal life span, with Edgar’s natural flair for the dramatic, would he have become John Wilkes Booth? Well, maybe not Booth, though they do both sport distinctive mustaches. If his mother had lived would we have lost Poe the writer to the stage? If John Allan had not been such a miser, would Poe have been too financially secure to scribble? If he’d married one of those rich widows he attempted to woo, would we have been graced with his tales of the macabre or would he have been a gentleman poet? It gives me a shudder.
Without the tragedies of Poe’s life, there is no Poe.
So as you read this book and Dawidziak unspools the trials and tribulations of Poe, think about how success would have changed the mindset of Poe. As you read this book think about how many things had to go wrong for this man, so that we have Edgar Allan Poe as a part of our literary horror landscape. If we remove his influence on the genre, what would the last one hundred and seventy-five years of horror literature look like? Would there be a Sherlock Holmes investigating The Hound of the Baskervilles? Would there be a Jekyll and Hyde? The listing of potential ramifications are endless. We are in the unenviable position as fans of Poe to wish ill upon him, even going so far as to wish him an early death. Poe scholar Steve Medeiros said it perfectly, “It’s almost as if a publicist stepped in and said, ‘Hey, you know, the best thing for you to do for your career is to die under mysterious circumstances at forty.’”
The mystery of mysteries is, Where was Poe the days prior to his death, September 27th- October 3rd? There were no witnesses, no sightings, no bloody trail to tell us what Poe was up to or even where he was? How did he end up in the gutter of a Baltimore polling station when he was supposed to be on his way to New York? Why was he found delirious, wearing another man’s clothes? If only Poe himself or his great detective C. Auguste Dupin was available in 1849 to investigate. Poe was too busy dying, and alas Dupin was only a figment of Poe’s imagination. The other unsolved mystery is, What did Poe die from? “The long list of candidates for what carried him off includes binge drinking, rabies, murder, a brain tumor, encephalitis brought on by exposure, syphilis, suicide, heart disease, carbon monoxide poisoning from illuminating coal gas, and dementia caused by normal pressure hydrocephalus.” Dawidziak takes on these theories, consults experts, and arrives at some thoughtful conclusions.
Of course, if you have a pet theory of your own, out of the twenty-two and counting conjectures regarding Poe’s death, there is always the possibility that fresh evidence will appear, but with what Dawidziak has discovered through his research coupled with his keen insights he presents a solid case for what exactly killed Poe.
Dawidziak uses a dual-timeline narrative that is so refreshing to read. I felt like I was following two mysteries at the same time that eventually dovetail together in the later chapters of the book. In the one timeline, he tells Poe’s backstory, while in the other timeline, he reveals the known and speculative events of the last few months of Poe’s life. Poe material I knew or thought I knew became new again. Whether you’re a rabid fan or a more casual admirer of Edgar Allan Poe, reading this book will enhance your pleasure of his work and give you a cold case to ponder as you toss and turn, twisting in your bed sheets, letting your nightmares weigh the evidence.
When you join the Pendergast newsletter they send you a free digital copy of this story and it is sooo good. If you are a fan of the series you will aWhen you join the Pendergast newsletter they send you a free digital copy of this story and it is sooo good. If you are a fan of the series you will also really enjoy their newsletters. Preston and Child have a lot of appreciation for their fans and frequently share free pieces of writing with them.
This was a dandy of a tale evoking elements of Poe and Stevenson. It certainly has me thinking...which one of their novels should I read next?
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”It had been set up almost like a scene in a play. A circular clearing had been made in the heart of the cornfield, the broken stalks carefully stacke”It had been set up almost like a scene in a play. A circular clearing had been made in the heart of the cornfield, the broken stalks carefully stacked to one side, leaving an area of dirt clods and stubble perhaps forty feet in diameter. Even in the terrible unreality of the moment, Haven found himself marveling at the geometrical precision with which the circle had been formed. At one end of the clearing stood a miniature forest of sharpened sticks, two to three feet high, pushed into the earth, their cruel-looking ends pointing upward. At the precise middle of the clearing stood a circle of dead crows spitted on stakes. Only they weren’t stakes but Indian arrows, each topped by a flaked point. There were at least a couple dozen of the birds, maybe more, their vacant eyes staring, yellow beaks pointing inward.
And in the center of the circle of crows lay the corpse of a woman. At least Sheriff Hazen thought it was a woman: her lips, nose and ears were missing.”
Sheriff Hazen of Medicine Creek, Kansas, catches this case by a matter of twelve feet. Twelve and a half feet another direction and this case would have belonged to the Staties. This is the type of case that will either put him on the front page of every newspaper in Kansas and possibly beyond, or it will be the type of case that makes him out to be the small town, chaw chewing, white trash moron that everyone expects him to be.
This is not only Kansas but Southwest Kansas, the navel lint in a great expanse of nothing. I should know: I live here. Well, not in Medicine Creek, which is a fictional small town, but it is a town that relies on Dodge City and Garden City for most everything they need. I could have practically driven out there and solved this case myself, but I’m really glad I decided to leave it to Special Agent Aloysius X.L. Pendergast because blood spray, eviscerations, and carved body parts make me queasy.
Medicine Creek is in competition with a town called Deeper for the KSU contract for a test field of a newfangled corn. Most of the corn grown around Medicine Creek is used for gasohol, which we usually refer to as ethanol. Our corn isn’t feeding the world as much as it is feeding our gas tanks. Personally, I think we should leave the growing of corn to the upper Midwest and grow more drought resistant crops, like wheat and hemp, but the boys in the laboratories have created a more drought resistant corn that has allowed it to grow with much less rainfall than when I was a kid. As one character put it in this novel, ”It wasn’t natural, to be surrounded by so much goddamn corn. It made people strange.” I don’t know about strange, but I can tell you there are few things that will play with your imagination more than being out in the middle of a corn field on a moonless night, especially one that has dry leaves and parched husks surrounding the ripened ears. A gentle breeze shuddering through the stalks will have your mind hearing the giggles of children of the corn, the rattle of a scarecrow scythe, and the rustling of terrifying creatures. And of course, your flashlight will first dim then wink out all together. To lend wings to your feet, you’ll start hearing...muuuuuhhhhh from something behind you, or is it in front of you?
Yeah, I’m glad Pendergast is in town to handle this one.
Like most small town people, the first thought that Sheriff Hazen has is that this can’t be a local killing people. It has to be someone from out of town. Pendergast is sure it has to be someone local. Pendergast irritates Hazen from the moment he steps off the bus in downtown, three whole blocks, Medicine Creek. He wears black, which unless you’re heading to a funeral, no one ever wears black in Southwest Kansas. I heard the same tired jokes every time I wore a black shirt to work...Johnny Cash just walked in folks. He is pale with disturbing eyes, but his ”voice redolent of mint julips, pralines, and cypress trees” betrays his New Orleans upbringing.
Pendergast further confounds the sheriff when he hires the resident troublemaker and black wearing goth, Corrie Swanson, to be his driver and confidant. Who knows what is actually going on in town better than teenagers?
With bodies continuing to show up, it soon becomes apparent that Medicine Creek is being terrorized by a serial killer...it's got to be some guy passing through, right? The MO of the killer is nonexistent. The profile is not of an organized or unorganized killer, but of something totally outside the realm of categorization. ”’The evil I’m talking about, most of the time it’s got an explanation. But some of the time’--he spat more tobacco juice, then leaned forward as if to impart a secret—‘some of the time, it just don’t.’”
So what the hell are they chasing?
This is one of the more gruesome entries in the series, but also the most compelling since the first one, Relic. I also find it interesting to read about the perceptions of writers who may have never set foot in Southwest Kansas writing about this area. Small towns are pretty much the same all over the United States with the same narrow-minded prejudices against anyone who doesn’t conform. Corrie Swanson is the perfect example of the type of kids who are driven out of small communities. The wall of loneliness and harassment that's imposed upon them by their peers is inescapable. Like Corrie, kids are trapped in a place where they are not only deemed different but undesirable. Pendergast knows better than anyone the perils of being seen as a nonconformist. As an adult, he has made an art form out of being different. Just his mere existence makes people uncomfortable. He is far from the buttoned-down FBI agent we are used to seeing in movies, and though he has made his share of enemies within the organisation, his closure rate on difficult cases keeps him from being booted from the Bureau. I really enjoy the relationship that is formed between Corrie and Pendergast. He represents a lifeline of the expanded opportunities that await her once she shakes off the dust of Medicine Creek.
This series is so fun, and there are so many more of them for me to read. Truly a plethora of riches.
“Why should this one wolf be shut up for an individual crime, when mass crimes go unpunished? When all society can turn into a wolf and be celebrated “Why should this one wolf be shut up for an individual crime, when mass crimes go unpunished? When all society can turn into a wolf and be celebrated with fife and drum and with flags curling in the wind? Why then shouldn’t this dog have his day too?”
Set against the background of the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870s where thousands are being slaughtered indiscriminately on the battlefield, why should society be so upset about a few dead prostitutes, a few disinterned and gnawed on corpses, and a bit of disconcerting howling in the middle of the night? Frankly, Paris has bigger issues, such as food. With the war effort taking too much food from the mouths of the population, even the rich are having to get creative with their dinner selections.
“Braised shoulder and undercut of dog with tomato sauce; Jugged cat with mushrooms; Dog cutlet with green peas; Venison ragout of rats, sauce Robert. Leg of dog and raccoon, pepper sauce.”
I must say I would more likely be out with the werewolf eating my neighbors before I’d even consider eating my dog. Most of the bloody action is kept off stage, but we do get treated to a few shiver-inducing glimpses of the werewolf at work. ”Suddenly, there was a piercing scream, a long drawn-out blood-curling yell that wound and wound, growing shriller and shriller, stopping suddenly with a deep dark gurgle as though all that vast sound were being sucked back and down into a waste-pipe.”
Few are as concerned about the activities of Bertrand Caillet as his Uncle Aymar Galliez, who has set down his adventures, what he knows of them, for posterity. “But there was a strange shame here that he could not overcome. Oh, the terrible disgrace, the ignominy of it—possessing a mythical monster in one’s own family, in this age of science and enlightenment!”
Bertrand is the product of a rape, a priestly rape, right beneath the stained glassed windows of the chapel. His mother Josephine was like a beast unleashed, as if this act of desecration against her body opened up the floodgates of her own pent up sexual desire. No man was safe from her needs, nor could they resist the offer of her charms. She shortly would be thought of as the town bicycle, with everyone getting a chance to ride. This was disconcerting to Aymar’s family who was charged with her care. The rather prudish Aymar also finds himself a “victim” of her alluring wanton flesh as well.
This is certainly a theme that Guy Endore explores throughout the book. The inner Hyde who resides in all of us. The werewolf is quite possibly the only one being honest about his own desires. The priest who debached Josephine, the neighborhood men who take advantage of Josephine’s newfound lack of inhibitions, and even Aymar falling prey to his denied yearnings are all upstanding members of society, but all eagerly participate in the ongoing debauchery of Josephine. Later when Bertrand meets the lovely Sophie, she is consumed by a different desire. She wants to feed him, much like a willing victim offering her neck to Dracula. ”He uncovered her. There was scarcely a portion of her body that had not one or more cuts on it. The older ones had healed to scars that traversed her dark skin with lines that were visibility lighter than the surrounding area. The newer ones were angry welts of red, or hard ridges of scab. In the candlelight the latter were like old jewelry or polished tortoiseshell.”
Sophie’s compliance is frankly terrifying. She is trying to keep Bertrand from killing and feeding, but she is also caught up in the sensual and carnal aspects of him lapping her blood. This induces more shivers for me than the prospect of Bertrand opening up a fountain of blood from some random victim. I also find it intriguing, considering the fact that this book was published in 1933, that there are numerous, spicy scenes that certainly would have made a young lady blush in the early twentieth century.
When we think of classic horror, the first books to come to mind are Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I would also include Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey. There is something missing from the canon, and that would be a classic tale of lycanthropy. Some would argue that Endore’s book should be included in this marquee group of tales that have had such an impact on culture. Certainly, the legend of the werewolf deserves a place in the highest pantheon of horror literature. Is this it? I’m not sure. There is a lot to like about this tale, but there is also some clunkiness to it as well, but there are clunky aspects to the other classic horror books, too. I wonder, if I had read this several times by this point in my life, if my relationship with it would be stronger?
Guy Endore, struggling novelist, was also a struggling screenwriter. He did see The Curse of the Werewolf, based on this book, produced and wrote the screenplay for The Mark of the Vampire. He was an unrepentant member of the communist party, and after he was blacklisted, continued to sell Hollywood scripts under a pseudonym. He wrote biographies about Casanova, Voltaire, and Joan of Arc that did reasonably well, but he is best known for being the writer of The Werewolf of Paris.
If you are a fan of the werewolf legends, you have to read this book. If you are a fan of classic horror, you should definitely read this book. I bought a copy of this book in 2015, and because recently I was working on a werewolf story of my own, I finally read it. I’m so glad I did and plan to read it again before I kick off this mortal coil, perhaps some night when the wind is blowing and the wolves are howling.
”The only places where the illustrated discourse radically departs from the written narrative are the graphic (in every sense of the term)
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”The only places where the illustrated discourse radically departs from the written narrative are the graphic (in every sense of the term) depictions of Hyde’s deportments (and Jekyll’s sexual phantasms). These are most often voyeuristic, reflecting Jekyll’s basically passive sexuality, but they can on occasion turn to cruel sadistic games, which represent in Jekyll the eruption of the Hyde element, characterized by the doctor as pure evil. It is the combination of these two elements, the passive and the aggressive, in the human psyche that conditions our total sexual being--a classic Feudian view.”
I often wonder what the first version of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde portrayed that Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, thought of as perverse. RLS was so angry at her reaction. He was a fiery Scot, though a very sick one, and he flung the manuscript on the flames of the fireplace. The first version of DJMR is lost to history. After reading this Guido Crepax interpretation of DJMR, I wonder now if Stevenson did not provide more detail in the first version about the perversions that Hyde was getting up to in the red light district. Hyde could do anything he wanted, knowing that the next day he would simply go back to being the respectful Dr. Jekyll. How would they ever hang him if they couldn’t find him?
If we were able to be unfettered, uninhibited, and knew without a doubt there would be no consequences for our actions, what beastily things would the rest of us get up to? Would Hyde be leering over our shoulders, chuckling at the hypocrites we are for judging him, when our own dark desires match the worst of his own?
The pictures of Hyde’s excessive behavior are graphic. Some would call them pornographic or just simply filth, but they are neither of those things. They are unsettling, but at the same time have a Victorian elegance about them. The participants still have a civilized deportment about them, even as someone is inserting an enema tube in their uplifted buttocks. As the intro quote alludes, Hyde is mostly an observer. With the lurking, deformed figure peering around a doorway or squinting around the arm of a chair at the depravity, it is clear he is directing.
There is a dream-like participation by the men and women caught up in his depravity, as if they have come under the magnetic sway of his persuasion.
Let’s not forget that Hyde is Jekyll and Jekyll is Hyde. It is Jekyll’s dark desires that drive the actions of Hyde. The real evil manifested itself in Jekyll long before Hyde was ever allowed out of his cage.
”I inherited a large fortune and always longed for the respect of society’s better class, yet I had a disposition for certain indecorous desires. Desires which I couldn't’ reconcile with my need for a reputation beyond reproach. Therefore I concealed my pleasures. Feeling shame and guilt. I lived a life of duplicity, but loathed hypocrisy and truly both of me were in dead earnest. My scientific studies went in search of a solution. A formula that could actually separate my conflicting personalities. On one side I would still be the upright Dr. Jekyll. On the other, a new man would be born more primal... free of any scruples.”
So yes, some of the pictures in this book might be offensive to some people. If you are rather sensitive to graphic material, then this is not the right book for you. For those who have an adventurous nature, who always wondered...what exactly did Hyde get up to...then you will enjoy Guido Crepax’s vision of what he believed happened off screen in the book. You might even disagree with him or think up your own version of Hyde’s dastardly deeds, and that will make the Hyde in you delighted. After all, this story is only a reflection of our own dark desires, but before you whip up your own potion to let your Hyde loose upon the world, be sure to read the book to the end.
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