Dr. Jekyll is a character who wanted to delve deeper into dormant aspects of his persona. How appropriate then that Leslie S. Klinger in The New Annotated Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde chose to burrow deep into the narrative and expose detailed layers of information regarding the man-men. And in the process, reveal quite a bit about the story’s author Robert Louis Stevenson. Indeed Klinger, an editor-annotator par excellence, has produced a cornucopia of insights about Jekyll and Hyde including adaptations to stage, screen, and graphic novels. Reading Stevenson’s novel with the annotations and copious illustrations enhanced my appreciation for the work. I found myself being drawn in by passages…

Catriona Ward upended the horror scene with her 2021 novel The Last House on Needless Street. It was the first of her books that I had read for review and, man, the way the story was told defied the basics of its narrative. It was a tour-de-force in terms of misdirection. The author expertly planted twists in the tale while revealing the inner workings of the fragile, and seriously twisted, characters. Riotous praise for the book rightfully ensued. When I was subsequently offered a copy of Little Eve, Ward’s Shirley Jackson Award winning novel which was originally published in 2018, I seized the opportunity. Little Eve had debuted in the U.K. and won the…

On September 4 the horror community was rocked by the death of Peter Straub. The iconic writer’s novel Ghost Story (1979) is often listed as one of the top ten books in the genre. And rightfully so. Since I’ve read Ghost Story multiple times, I decided to mourn Straub’s passing and honor his memory by revisiting another of his works. Lost Boy Lost Girl (2003) excellently displays the author’s literary bravura. Straub possessed a dexterous sleight-of-hand stylistic ability that heightened his creation of narrative ambiguity. In Lost Boy Lost Girl there is a tweaking of the meta mentality and a toying with temporal structure. Both of those devices combine with…