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. --David Pitt
"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')." - Publishers Weekly, boxed and starred
"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." - Booklist
"Levine’s masterful in his surrealistic observations of Hyde subsuming Jekyll...Cleverly imagined and sophisticated in execution..." – Kirkus
"Hyde 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
"Daniel Levine’s ambitious and imaginative literary debut...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...Levine answers many questions that Stevenson left unexplored....a visually dark and viscerally brooding tale that avails itself of a cinematic style of storytelling that, of course, Stevenson could never have imagined....an entertaining and intriguing work, as much a meditation on and extrapolation of Stevenson’s original intentions as a freestanding work of popular fiction. With compelling intensity, Levine makes a noteworthy literary debut." - BookPage
“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
“Daniel Levine locates the strange beneath the familiar in this intricately imagined, meticulously executed debut. You may think you know Dr. Jekyll, but this Hyde is a different beast altogether.” -- Jon Clinch, author of Finn and The Thief of Auschwitz
“Daniel Levine has staked his claim to one of the most compelling stories of all time, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and brilliantly made it his own in this knockout debut novel. The mind of Hyde is as dark and twisted and alluring as the night-cloaked streets of 19th century London, and this book is as much a fascinating psychological query as it is a gripping narrative.”—Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon, The Wilding, and Refresh, Refresh
"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 Daniel 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