I’ve had the book for a while but finally got around to reading it, while waiting for Notes from Underground(Dostoevsky) to arrive. When I first got the book through Amazon I was surprised how short it was, I was only aware of the common expression of Jekyll/Hyde and I watched the characters in the movie the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen where they’re pretty much just the Hulk, a character the book probably inspired. The short length is definitely a good choice because the main point or the most important message is delivered in the last chapter(Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case), and everything before it is just to set that up. I feel the author Robert Louis Stevenson really poured his experiences in that last chapter, and it was heavy stuff that culminates in a terrific way to end a book down to the last sentence. It’s a classic for a reason and highly recommended.
Like a juggernaut trampling a child at each intersection and moving on. (Or something to that effect.)
Actually, it’s much better than my poor recollection:
“The figure in these two phases haunted the lawyer all night; and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamplighted city, and at every street corner crush a child and leave her screaming.”