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Summary
Summary
"A n ingenious revision" of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Gothic story told through the eyes of the fiend ( The New York Times Book Review ).
Mr. Hyde is trapped, locked in Dr. Jekyll's house, certain of his inevitable capture. As the dreadful hours pass, he has the chance, finally, to tell his side of the story--one of buried dreams and dark lusts, both liberating and obscured in the gaslit fog of Victorian London's sordid backstreets.
Summoned to life by strange potions, Hyde knows not when or how long he will have control of "the body." When dormant, he watches Dr. Jekyll from a distance, conscious of this other, high-class life but without influence. As the experiment continues, their mutual existence is threatened, not only by the uncertainties of untested science, but also by a mysterious stalker. Hyde is being taunted--possibly framed. Girls have gone missing; a murder has been committed. And someone is always watching from the shadows. In the blur of this shared consciousness, can Hyde ever truly know if these crimes were committed by his hands?
Narrated by Hyde, this serpentine tale about the nature of evil, addiction, and the duality of man "delivers a new look at this enigmatic character and intriguing possible explanations for Jekyll's behavior" ( The Washington Post , Five Best Thrillers of 2014).
" Hyde brings into the light the various horrors still hidden in the dark heart of Stevenson's classic tale . . . a blazing triumph of the gothic imagination." --Patrick McGrath, author of Asylum
"Earthy, lurid, and unsparing . . . a worthy companion to its predecessor. It's rich in gloomy, moody atmosphere (Levine's London has a brutal steampunk quality), and its narrator's plight is genuinely poignant." -- The New York Times Book Review , Editors' Choice
Author Notes
Daniel Levine studied English Literature and Creative Writing at Brown University and received his MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Florida. He has taught composition and creative writing at high schools and universities, including the University of Florida, Montclair State University, and Metropolitan State College of Denver. Originally from New Jersey, he now lives in Colorado.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Narrated by Dr. Henry Jekyll, Robert Louis Stevenson's classic embodiment of the dark side of the human consciousness, this ambitious first novel provides an alternate perspective on Jekyll's chemical experiments on the split personality. Edward Hyde first emerges independent of Jekyll on the streets of London in 1884-not as the malevolent brute that Stevenson conjured, but as a member of the lower classes who is fiercely protective of his and Hyde's friends and interests. But over the course of two years, Hyde develops a reputation for evil that confounds him-and that he suspects is being engineered by Jekyll, whose consciousness lurks inside his own, steering him into certain assignations and possibly committing atrocities while in his form. Levine slowly unfolds the backstory of Jekyll's schemes for Hyde, relating to his earlier failed "treatment" of a patient with a multiple-personality disorder, and traumatic events from Jekyll's own childhood that come to light in the novel's tragic denouement. Levine's evocation of Victorian England is marvelously authentic, and his skill at grounding his narrative in arresting descriptive images is masterful (of the haggard, emotionally troubled Jekyll, he writes, "He looked as if he'd survived an Arctic winter locked within a ship frozen fast in the wastes"). If this exceptional variation on a classic has any drawback, it's that it particularizes to a single character a malaise that Stevenson originally presented belonging universally to the human condition. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Imagine that Edward Hyde, the alter ego of Dr. Jekyll, wasn't the animalistic creature Robert Louis Stevenson created. Imagine, instead, that he was just a man and a misunderstood one at that. That's Levine's approach to this revisionist take on Stevenson's classic tale, which is reprinted here, after Levine's own story has come to a close. Levine's version, narrated by Hyde, begins just before Stevenson's ends: Hyde is concealed in Jekyll's laboratory, Jekyll's letter to his lawyer awaits discovery, Hyde waits to die. Hyde takes us back through the preceding months, covering the same ground as Stevenson but from a new perspective: Hyde as a newborn man, struggling to understand the world he's been thrust into, driven by desperation to commit the acts recounted by Stevenson. We realize, in the process, how little Stevenson really explored Edward Hyde, how Hyde was a function of the narrative, an idea but not a fleshed-out man. Giving him flesh and humanity, Levine makes him a kind of tragic hero and gives the original version an added dramatic and emotional dimension. A fascinating companion piece to a classic story.--Pitt, David Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is an oblique and artful Gothic tale framed as a detective story. The truth seeker is Jekyll's lawyer, Utterson, the book's most prominent character. Jekyll-the gentleman who dabbles in chemical self-transformation - appears only intermittently, never fully speaking for himself until the end, when he discloses the details of the disastrous experiments that unleashed his primitive alter ego. The novel isn't a conventional horror story, lingering on the macabre for its own sake, but an allegory of the divided self, perhaps also a meditation on addiction. Stevenson dramatizes human duality but doesn't analyze its causes, treating it as pervasive and fundamental. For him, the Jekyll-Hyde split is the split in all of us, between the animals we evolved from and the angels we aspire to be. "Hyde" is the first-time novelist Daniel Levine's ingenious revision of this canonical work, an elevated exercise in fan fiction that complicates and reorients the story by telling it from the perspective of the monster, exposing the tender heart inside the brute and emphasizing the pathos of his predicament. Hyde is an outlet for Jekyll's buried lusts, a manifestation of his banished id, but he is also a person in his own right who longs for acknowledgment and recognition. Far from being the accidental product of Jekyll's experimental potion, he's an integral, abiding second self who first emerged during Jekyll's painful childhood as a defense against severe abuse and then went dormant inside him for decades, until the medicine reawakened him. While Stevenson casts Hyde as purely evil, a creature without a conscience, Levine - by placing him center stage and awarding him a full measure of humanity - portrays him as a wounded innocent, scorned, bewildered and oppressed. He dwells like a squatter in the body that he and Jekyll share, an illegal lodger, without rights. Levine's book is appreciably longer than Stevenson's, chiefly because it's vastly more subjective, describing the tortured Hyde's interior life as he waits, locked in Jekyll's house, for the authorities to catch up with him after his murder of a member of Parliament who discovered his and Jekyll's secret. The mood is one of frustration and claustrophobia. For as long as he can remember, Hyde has lived as the captive of his master, able to observe the doctor's deeds and draw inferences from his behavior but lacking access to his thoughts. Levine exploits this unusual arrangement to invent a hybrid point of view that fuses the first person and the third. Hyde, the "I," refers to Jekyll as "he" and to their composite being as "we." This fractured perspective takes some getting used to, but eventually it feels logical and apt, elegantly expressing the mind's plurality and its propensity for self-estrangement. We are many, every one of us, peering inward and outward simultaneously and beholding our lives from conflicting, varied angles that we perpetually strive to reconcile. For Hyde, this task is singularly difficult; his peculiar existence denies him wholeness, condemning him to confusion and anxiety. In "Hyde," the outside world - Victorian London - is as byzantine as its narrator's inner world. It's a murky metropolis of vice and cruelty, especially at night, which is when Hyde can most freely range about, his fearsome visage obscured by shadows. The gaslit, mazelike, foggy city that Stevenson only lightly sketched engrosses and excites Levine, particularly its seamy side of swarming, roaring pubs and vile back-alley brothels. Hyde is drawn to these dubious establishments by impulses he only half understands but is powerless to check because they emanate from Jekyll, the upright scientist and man of means for whom reason and civilized comforts have fallen short. The brothels where he seeks companionship specialize, some of them, in supplying little girls for callous, predatory gentlemen. The girls are slaves, held hostage in much the same way that Hyde is chained to Jekyll, suggesting a moral cleavage within society that mirrors the divided makeup of the main character. This backdrop creates sympathy for Hyde, a being capable of many sins but immune to the one that defines his age, hypocrisy, because he wears no public mask of virtue. He does have a gallant side, however. His affinity for the helpless and exploited impels him to rescue a child prostitute and violently confront a prowling john. The language of Hyde's long, melancholy monologue - the pleading, anguished final testament of a creature confronting its own extinction - is earthy, lurid and unsparing, a departure from Stevenson's smoother, more decorous prose. The word "spittle" comes up a bit too often, and great attention is paid to noxious odors, filthy garments and uncomfortable bodily sensations. The acts of mastication and defecation are described in graphic, grinding close-up, rendering them equally unappealing. "Hyde," at its core, is a novel of revulsion, its forsaken protagonist severed from true pleasure by a nervous system that's not his own and an acutely jarring upbringing at the hands of a stern, sadistic father. Though the traumas the man inflicted are left vague, some are clearly sexual, the products of his eccentric, warped philosophy of male erotic development. The boy disintegrates under this harsh regimen and brings forth Hyde, his imaginary ally and a vessel for his rage. BY CHOOSING to ground his protagonist's tragic fissure in disfiguring childhood experiences, Levine makes the story feel more contemporary but compromises its universality and somewhat dissipates its mystery, turning a fable into a kind of memoir. The imposition of Freudian psychology on a pre-Freudian scenario feels patronizing and reductive. (Rearranging the past to conform to present theories is one of historical fiction's favorite tricks, but sometimes the temptation is best resisted.) The novel is a pleasure nonetheless, a worthy companion to its predecessor. It's rich in gloomy, moody atmosphere (Levine's London has a brutal steampunk quality), and its narrator's plight is genuinely poignant. The best parts are those in which Hyde peers out at Jekyll as though he were a stranger, straining to understand him, to know his thoughts. Hyde yearns, above all, for intimacy with his host, for relief from his own isolation, but it eludes him. He's the unconscious mind personified, submerged, ignored and desperate to be heard. WALTER KIRN'S most recent book is "Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade."
Kirkus Review
Levine debuts with a dark literary-fiction re-imagining of the macabre tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde. Dr. Jekyll's an "alienist," precursor of the psychiatrist, but it's Hyde who seizes control and rips the narrative open. Jekyll's studied in Paris recently, supposedly treating a man with multiple personalities, but after returning from France, Jekyll has befuddled those who know him best with his machinations--Utterson, his attorney, Lanyon, a fellow physician, and Poole, his butler. It seems he's brought chemicals that provoke an exchange of one personality for another, and secretly, Jekyll's dosing himself. Levine's rendering of bustling Victorian London, misty-cold winters and summers "filled with gauzy lemony light," provides the stage for Hyde's midnight, fog-shrouded ramblings from tavern to brothel. Levine's tale is dense, layered, sometimes obscure, its twisted origins resting with Jekyll's dead father, who inflicted upon the boy perverse sexual manipulations and other cruelties. With the potion, the buried perversions flower as Hyde plunges into London's debauched quarters, driven by Jekyll's sexual deviations. Hyde beds Jeannie, 14-year-old street girl, and then installs her at a derelict mansion he's leased, only to recognize he's acting out Jekyll's impotence in consummating a sexual relationship with married Georgiana, a lost love. Levine's characters are fully realized, but many are abandoned in narrative cul-de-sacs: a housekeeper, a Tarot reader, a maid who has been raped. Levine's masterful in his surrealistic observations of Hyde subsuming Jekyll. Hyde is all unfettered compulsion yet selfishly connected to his better nature because "[h]e was my hideout, my sanctuary." The fracture comes with Hyde's murder of Jekyll's acquaintance, Sir Danvers X. Carew, MP, part of the London Committee for the Suppression of Traffic in Young English Girls, after which Hyde-Jekyll retreat to an abandoned surgery with a dwindling supply of the chemical catalyst. Cleverly imagined and sophisticated in execution, this book may appeal to those who like magical realism and vampire stories, but the latter should know that the book is more intellectual than thriller.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
It's Mr. Hyde's turn as unreliable narrator in this literary reimagining of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Accused of murder and sexual trafficking of minors, Hyde has hidden himself in Jekyll's closet. As he awaits discovery he unfurls a tale that sheds doubt on Jekyll's innocence-but does it absolve Hyde? Levine's palette includes every shade of gray as he explores moral ambiguity and mental anguish in this psychological gothic. VERDICT Levine's debut novel is deviously plotted but relies a great deal on readers having a close familiarity with the parent text, while the anachronistically graphic descriptions of sex and violence may be off-putting for some. On the other hand, readers who enjoy the grittier crime fiction of Dennis Lehane, James Ellroy, and John Connolly might give it a try.-Liv Hanson, Chicago (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Day One Morning Henry Jekyll is dead. I whisper the words and then listen, as if I've dropped a stone into a well and await the plunk and splash . . . But inside my head there is only silence. All around me a chorus of celebratory noises fills the void: the simmering pop of the coals in the stove, the nautical creak of the whole wooden cabinet, and a faint, high-pitched cheeping from beyond the windows that sounds almost like baby birds. Here I sit in Jekyll's chair by these three encrusted casement windows, with his mildewed overcoat draped about my shoulders like a travelling cloak. My journey's end. The transformation has never felt so smooth before. No spinning sickness, no pain. Just a gentle dissolution: Jekyll evaporating like atomic particles into the air and leaving me behind in the body. This time for good. Extinction . That was the word Darwin used in his book, which Jekyll befouled weeks ago and then dumped from the chamber pot out the window (no doubt it still lies down there in the yard like a spine-broken bird tumbled from flight). Extinction. Do the races of men , Darwin said, encroach on and replace one another, so that some finally become extinct? Jekyll refused to explain this concept to me. But now I begin to glimpse what extinction really means. I have been singled out. Selected for survival. The fine hairs along my forearm rise into filaments. I look down at my left hand, resting in my lap like a pale crab, belly-up, the fingers loosely curled. The fraying cuff of Jekyll's shirt is folded back once, revealing the lavender tail of the vein that runs to my wrist. Gingerly I draw the cuff farther up the arm and see the purple lines of infection fork and branch into darkened tributaries that reconverge at the crook of my elbow, which I bare with a hissing wince. The abscess in the notch has gone black, juicy and fat, like a blood-gorged spider at the heart of its web, its abdomen a-throb. I brush my thumb down the cubital vein, hard as a violin string under the skin and scattered with systematic punctures, some scabbed over and some red and fresh, my various points of entry. Look at what he's left me. What he's made me do. All those experimental powders, those double injections--and for what? The end is the same. My pulse thumps in vindication as I turn in the chair and stare across the cabinet laboratory at Jekyll's writing desk. The white envelope sits propped up against the brass-and-bell-glass lamp. Just as he left it an hour ago. Even in this wan light I can read the elaborate contour of ink across the envelope face: Gabriel John Utterson . For the past week I have watched Jekyll scratch out those buckled pages of frantic confession that are folded inside this envelope. Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case. Possessed by his own demented monologue, Jekyll would scribble, lips twisting, for hours--and then he would stop cold and glance up, as if he'd detected a furtive footstep from behind. Amazed, I peered out, surrounded by the pump of his blood, the fizzling whisper of his thoughts, and watched him ease open the lowest drawer of the desk, lift the false wooden bottom, and stash the accumulating pages in the secret under-space compartment. As if he somehow hoped to hide them from me. As if he believed I could not read through his own eyes every word he was writing--believed I would rip his precious manifesto to scraps if he were to leave it lying in the open. Lunacy! And yet after all that, this very morning when he is finally finished, what does he do? He stuffs the pages into that envelope, addresses the crazy thing to his best friend and solicitor, and props it up right bloody there on his desk for me to destroy at my leisure! I won't destroy it, of course. I have no reason to touch it. Let Utterson find it and read it. The solicitor is no fool. From the moment he first heard my name fall from Jekyll's lips, Utterson knew he was not being given the story entire but rather a carefully manicured account. Why should Jekyll's written confession be any different? From the first line, Utterson will see that the statement is anything but full , that it is little more than his friend's dying, desperate protestation of innocence. Why should I waste the effort? No, I won't deny Jekyll his pathetic self-exoneration. But neither will I let him have the final say. I don't know how much longer I have before Poole realises it's me festering up here--the wanted murderer Edward Hyde--and not his master. Jekyll's man to the last, trusty old Poole. Twice a day for the past two months, he's been ferrying his master's meals on a tray with a domed silver cover across the gravel courtyard from Big House: charred bangers and glutinous eggs and a leaky slice of grilled tomato for breakfast, then a chop or chicken or minced pie sometimes for supper. But this arrangement won't continue indefinitely. Surely this evening, the moment Poole throws open the rusty steel door, he will feel the change, like a temperature drop, in the gloomy depths of the surgery block below me. With chilled breath he will stand at the foot of the stairs, holding the tray, staring up the dark rickety ascent at the cabinet door behind which I crouch. Will he climb up to the door himself and knock? Or will he fetch Utterson to do it? Yes, it will be Utterson who knocks, Utterson who shouts out, Harry, open this door at once! Jekyll knew his friend would be coming, of course. Jekyll knew how it all would end: Utterson pounding at the door and Poole a step below, armed with some implement to smash the door down, that black-headed axe with a silver gleam along its lip. Take it down, Poole! Utterson will cry, and the door will jump and crack as the blade bites in. Our saviours, who will arrive far too late to save anyone. I shake off a ripple of goose flesh and peer out one of the three iron-framed casement windows that overlook the white gravel yard. A low stratum of morning fog moves like dense liquid over the stones. Above the boxy, silhouetted back end of the surgery block, to the east, the sky is soft cerulean blue, ribbed with pink fire. My breath mists up the glass, and I draw back, wipe the pane with the squeaky meat of my palm. Seven o'clock. Jekyll stopped winding his pocket watch over a month ago, but I can tell the hour by the light and by Poole's comings and goings. Breakfast at half past eight, and supper at six. I have some time yet. And anyhow, the end will not come today. I am oddly certain of this. I have been selected. Granted this final spell of solitude, alone in the body, to set our story straight. I don't want to die with Jekyll's hectic lies echoing in my mind like the jeers of a mob at an execution. I don't want to die at all, but if there's no escaping it, then at the very least I want to remember everything properly first, the way it truly happened. The truth is inside this head. I simply must extract it. In the end no one will know it but me, but that will be enough. I shut my eyes, blow out a trembling breath. A nerve in my hand is twitching an erratic pulse, like a telegraphic code. Tap-tap, tap , down the wire. I am alone, I whisper. I am all alone. Excerpted from Hyde by Daniel Levine All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.