I was six years old when I walked into a bookstore in Holland, Michigan with my family and met Dr. Jekyll for the first time. We had recently watched The Great Mouse Detective and I saw the unmistakable archetypes of villainy and goodness emblazoned on an inexpensive hardback edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s most famous horror story: here, to the right, was the hero – handsome with his steely eyes and brown sideburns, analyzing a test tube that to me symbolized detective w

J. M. Barrie, the Scottish playwright and author of Peter Pan, once quipped that the initials “R.L.S.” are “the best beloved in recent literature.” A quick comparison between Pan and Treasure Island, Kidnapped, or The Black Arrow will remove any doubt that the writer was making an impersonal observation. Edmond Gosse agreed that he was “the most beloved of all the authors of our time,” and William Gladstone, Prime Minister at the time, stayed up an entire night reading Treasu

To this day the name Stevenson resonates to some in the same way that Stoker and Shelley do – as the creator of one of literature’s most enduring monsters: he is to the literary werewolf what Stoker is to the Gothic vampire -- Shelley to the science fiction monster. But unlike the other members of the Three S’s club, Stevenson’s work has a strong footing in the world of high literature. Chesterton and Nabakov pored over his works and wrote enthusiastic criticism in his name.

"Thrawn Janet" is one of the most ghoulish and twisted (pun) horror stories to come from a Victorian pen. It is one of Stevenson's best supernatural stories, and it is an underrated classic, forged in a deeply Hawthornian tradition of social responsibility, fear of the unconventional, and the battle waging between nature and civilization, reason and impulse, discipline and indulgence. There is only one problem: most 21st century English-speaking readers can only infer most of