Hyde
An authentic, gothic reimagining of Robert Louis Stevenson' s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , told from the villain' s perspective, that takes readers deep into the seedy side of Victorian London and explores the nature of personality and of the subconscious Mr. Hyde is trapped in Dr. Jekyll' s surgical cabinet, counting the days until he will face capture and be forced to make the ultimate choice about survival. Over the course of four days, he thinks back on what brought him to this moment, and he finally has the chance to tell the story of his brief but marvelous life. In liberating Mr. Hyde from the omniscient perspective of the original story, the author takes us inside the mind Hyde shares with Jekyll as he awakens after many years of dormancy, wide-eyed at being able to explore the world on his own. We feel the potions take effect. We tromp through the streets of London, drink gin in seedy pubs, we visit doll shops and menace the men who take advantage of the women there, and we attempt to rescue lost girls. We feel the strange distance of watching Jekyll' s high-class life through a membrane of consciousness. And then we feel the helplessness of someone being framed for serious crimes. The evidence all points to Hyde. Even if he didn' t intend to commit these crimes, is it possible that they have been perpetrated, without his knowledge, by his own hand?
"1116226351"
Hyde
An authentic, gothic reimagining of Robert Louis Stevenson' s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , told from the villain' s perspective, that takes readers deep into the seedy side of Victorian London and explores the nature of personality and of the subconscious Mr. Hyde is trapped in Dr. Jekyll' s surgical cabinet, counting the days until he will face capture and be forced to make the ultimate choice about survival. Over the course of four days, he thinks back on what brought him to this moment, and he finally has the chance to tell the story of his brief but marvelous life. In liberating Mr. Hyde from the omniscient perspective of the original story, the author takes us inside the mind Hyde shares with Jekyll as he awakens after many years of dormancy, wide-eyed at being able to explore the world on his own. We feel the potions take effect. We tromp through the streets of London, drink gin in seedy pubs, we visit doll shops and menace the men who take advantage of the women there, and we attempt to rescue lost girls. We feel the strange distance of watching Jekyll' s high-class life through a membrane of consciousness. And then we feel the helplessness of someone being framed for serious crimes. The evidence all points to Hyde. Even if he didn' t intend to commit these crimes, is it possible that they have been perpetrated, without his knowledge, by his own hand?
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Hyde

Hyde

by Daniel Levine

Narrated by John Curless

Unabridged — 16 hours, 40 minutes

Hyde

Hyde

by Daniel Levine

Narrated by John Curless

Unabridged — 16 hours, 40 minutes

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Overview

An authentic, gothic reimagining of Robert Louis Stevenson' s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , told from the villain' s perspective, that takes readers deep into the seedy side of Victorian London and explores the nature of personality and of the subconscious Mr. Hyde is trapped in Dr. Jekyll' s surgical cabinet, counting the days until he will face capture and be forced to make the ultimate choice about survival. Over the course of four days, he thinks back on what brought him to this moment, and he finally has the chance to tell the story of his brief but marvelous life. In liberating Mr. Hyde from the omniscient perspective of the original story, the author takes us inside the mind Hyde shares with Jekyll as he awakens after many years of dormancy, wide-eyed at being able to explore the world on his own. We feel the potions take effect. We tromp through the streets of London, drink gin in seedy pubs, we visit doll shops and menace the men who take advantage of the women there, and we attempt to rescue lost girls. We feel the strange distance of watching Jekyll' s high-class life through a membrane of consciousness. And then we feel the helplessness of someone being framed for serious crimes. The evidence all points to Hyde. Even if he didn' t intend to commit these crimes, is it possible that they have been perpetrated, without his knowledge, by his own hand?

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Walter Kirn

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…The novel is a pleasure…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.

Publishers Weekly

★ 01/20/2014
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.)

From the Publisher

[An] ingenious revision . . . exposing the tender heart inside the brute and emphasizing the pathos of his predicament . . . A pleasure . . . [and] 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.” — New York Times Book Review “Riveting Hyde renders evil in shades of gray . . . in his spellbinding first novel [Levine] offers many surprises and rich, often intoxicating prose. It’s a fascinating read.” — Washington Post “Levine’s account is a masterpiece of hallucination; his narrator is feverish, righteous, intense . . . And about that confession: Hyde doesn’t open it, and neither does Levine. He leaves it to Stevenson, to whom he is faithful with his prose. The shockers may be born of this century, but this chilling new version is a remarkably good fit with the original horror classic.” — Miami Herald “Levine’s intelligent and brutal first novel, Hyde, puts a fresh spin on the well-worn material . . . It goes beyond a companion piece to an independent novel worth reading in its own right.” — Columbus DispatchHyde is masterfully told, with plenty of damp and spooky London gothic atmosphere . . . A haunting yarn with a sumptuous Victorian atmosphere exquisitely re-imagines Stevenson’s ‘monster,’ the maligned Hyde.” — Shelf Awareness “Richly detailed and engrossing portrait of psychological disintegration.” — LitReactor “Levine’s evocation of Victorian England is marvelously authentic, and his skill at grounding his narrative in arresting descriptive images is masterful.” — Publishers Weekly, starred and boxed review “Ambitious and imaginative . . . Taking the parameters of Stevenson’s story, but deepening and extending the details, Levine allows us to view Hyde not merely as the venal incarnation of Jekyll’s soul, but as a fully fledged character in his own right—and, in many ways, a sympathetic one as well . . . With compelling intensity, Levine makes a noteworthy literary debut.” — BookPage “Levine’s masterful in his surrealistic observations of Hyde subsuming Jekyll . . . Cleverly imagined and sophisticated in execution.” — Kirkus Reviews “Prepare to be seduced by literary devilry! Go back to Victorian times to find a very postmodern whodunit. Visceral prose, atmosphere you could choke on, characters who seem to be at your very shoulder. My sole regret after spending several hours inside Daniel Levine’s highly literate thriller is that I didn’t think of Hyde for myself.” — Ronald Frame, author of Havisham “A gloriously disturbing portrait of man’s animal nature ascendant, Hyde brings into the light the various horrors still hidden in the dark heart of Stevenson’s classic tale of monstrosity and addiction. It’s Levine’s extraordinary achievement to give voice to a creature capable of indulging every impulse of transgression, while driving its higher self to damnation. Devious and ingenious, Hyde is a blazing triumph of the gothic imagination.” — Patrick McGrath, author of Asylum, Martha Peake, Spider, and others “This rich, allusive, erudite novel is a welcome reminder of what a tour de force really is.” — David Leavitt, author of The Indian Clerk and many others “Levine locates the strange beneath the familiar in this in —

Library Journal

01/01/2014
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

Kirkus Reviews

2013-12-19
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.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940171253196
Publisher: Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date: 03/18/2014
Edition description: Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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.

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