Book review: "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"

 (Warning: This review has spoilers. But, c'mon, you've had 139 years to read "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," so if you haven't finished it yet, that's on you.)

I was surprised by how short "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is. This famous 1886 novella, by Robert Louis Stevenson, was only 149 screen-pages on my phone (by comparison, "Moby Dick" was 1,299). I read it in less than a day.

It seemed like it was over too soon, especially considering the fame of the story. We've all heard countless references to "Jekyll and Hyde," right? We know, even if you haven't read the novella, that the names are shorthand for two opposite personalities — one good, one evil.

Stevenson presents the story as a mystery. A Mr. Edward Hyde has been seen doing terrible things around town, even murder, but no one realizes that he is actually the well-respected Dr. Henry Jekyll. 

This wasn't a mystery to me, or probably most readers, I'm sure. But that did not prevent it from being a compelling story. The plot moves sharply along and quickly becomes a page-turner. Stevenson's writing, though somewhat antiquated in language, is detailed and evocative. Consider this passage, when Mr. Hyde confronts a elderly man on a darkened street:

The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very much surprised and trifle hurt; and at that Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway. 

Yikes.

In the final chapter of the book, Dr. Jekyll reveals in a lengthy letter (much like a monologue) that he created Mr. Hyde while experiementing with drugs to separate his "evil" side from the rest of him.

"Man is not truly one, but truly two," says Dr. Jekyll, showing his philosophical side.

Dr. Jekyll believed that separating out the evil side would allow his "upright" side to thrive.

If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.

Not surprisingly, things don't go as planned. The unleashed evil Mr. Hyde thrives and threatens to completely take over Dr. Jekyll. 

My virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion ... I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse. 

While this last chapter is essential for telling the story, it is also too one-dimensional, too long and too repetitive. The chapter consumes fully the last quarter of the book and it is entirely Dr. Jekyll's monologue. Though it has merits, this section sucks much of the energy from a book filled with a stirring plot and character interplay.

That said, there's no doubt that "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" makes you think  I was tempted at first to view this simply as a story about schizophrenia, but I soon realized it goes deeper. Stevenson raises important questions about the human mind and how we manage our views of right and wrong.

"All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil," says Dr. Jekyll, "and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil."

Book review: "Mud Season" by Jeff Kramer

 If you're intending to read Jeff Kramer's 2025 debut novel "Mud Season," I have advice: Once you start, read it as fast as possible.

That's because "Mud Season" has a lot of characters — and importantly, it has many similar characters. Reading the book swiftly will help you keep the characters straight. This isn't a big ask, really, because the book is so enjoyable you'll probably want to keep going.

The character similarity is by design. "Mud Season" tells the story of an angst-ridden writer whose new novel features characters that seem a lot like people he knows, prompting readers to rush to troubling conclusions and alarming his in-laws, who feel the book is demonizing them.

For every major character in the main story there is a similar character in the book within the book. Protagonist Woody Hackworth is an embittered journalist and so is the lead character in his book, Cus Stanston (though Woody conveniently makes his doppelganger taller and more handsome). 

Woody has a flirtatious relationship with a woman named Celeste;  Cus has an extramarital affair with a woman named Aurora. 

Most importantly, Woody makes the chief villain of his novel Cus's father-in-law, the head of a concrete company, causing readers to assume he's referring to his own father-in-law, the head of an excavation and demoliton company.

Even the book titles are similar: The book within "Mud Season" is called "Fear as Mud."

Yes, it's a tangled web, but it's also a fun one — a clever, witty, entertaining ride filled with humor and unexpected twists. This is defintely not a cookie-cutter plot. 

(It's worth noting that the book has not just two levels, but three. Author Jeff Kramer, like Woody and Cus, is a journalist. Like his characters, Kramer lives in upstate New York. And Kramer's father-in-law was the owner of a roofing company).

In Woody Hackworth, Kramer has an unusual protagonist. Woody is a sad sack filled with an anxieties and an inferiority complex, so compelled to prove himself by writing a successful book that he seems ready to torpedo his marriage, fracture his relationship with his daughter and make enemies of his in-laws. He's not really likeable, but in his confused selfishness he is, somehow, lovable. 

One of the most unique elements of "Mud Season" is the way it gives readers a glimpse into a writer's mind. Kramer smartly has Woody releasing his novel as a serial, publishing one chapter at a time online while he's still writing the rest. 

This means that the writing — and rewriting —  of "Fear as Mud" is intertwined with the plot. Kramer shows how a writer considers word and phrase choices, character arcs and story logic. Woody ponders whether "fruition" is the right word to use in a sex scene, how evil to make the wife in his story, and how much "ethnic" background to add to his characters when he realizes the story is filled with white people. 

All writers experience this sort of mental gymnastics, but it's often hard to show it. Kramer makes it tangible, and you can imagine the parallel with his own internal debates as he wrote "Mud Season". 

The book is dotted with humor and snark, some of it delivered off-hand and quickly while the plot moves on. At one point, Woody bungles the title of Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" as "The Mason Jar." In another scene, listening to a doctor describe a character's brain tumor, Woody's mind drifts away, imaging an auto mechanic. "He might as well be saying Joe's brake pads are down to 20% and there's a recall on his electronic ignition shift."

A small warning: This is something of a "guy's book." That doesn't mean women might not enjoy it, but understand that it does come from the perspective of a man, with multiple references to the sexual attractiveness of women and some hard drinking. 

Kramer is careful to make the book within the book — the novel by Woody Hackworth — slightly clumsily written. It opens with, "It wasn't a particularly stormy night, but it was definitely dark, dark as the ink drying on the latest scoop of the best all-around reporter at the Tiberius Daily Informer."

Later, when Cus and Aurora are having sex, the book describes "great rockets of passion and liftoff became imminent." In a different scene, the fawning Aurora wonders about Cus, "Was there nothing her dashing defender of Earth and sky didn't know?"

Like I said, this is a fun read.