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

Robert Louis Stevenson was raised in a devout Presbyterian household. His father was a devoted Tory, and his family was proud of his trajectory to join the law profession, but in 1867 he attended Edinburgh University, and the love of his parents was deeply tested as their son became increasingly attracted to radical philosophies. Things came to a boil in 1873 when his father was crushed to learn that his son – a self-described “red-hot socialist” – had embraced atheism, and b

One of Stevenson’s most shamefully underrated short stories, “Olalla” (pronounced oh-LIE-yuh), is a masterpiece of erotic horror, one of the most teasingly ambiguous vampire stories in English, and a prefiguration of Jung’s analytical theories of the Self. The novelette also represents one of the most successful pastiches of Edgar Allan Poe’s metaphysical fiction. Combining elements of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Berenice,” “Morella,” “Ligeia,” and the poems “Ulalume,”

Other than “Jekyll and Hyde,” none of Stevenson’s horror tales have been as celebrated as “The Body Snatcher.” It has a habit of regularly appearing in anthologies of classic terror beside “The Judge’s House,” “The Black Cat,” “The Monkey’s Paw,” and “The Damned Thing.” The story truly belongs in the canon of the weird, for it is not classifiable. The ultimate manifestation cannot be conclusively called a ghost, a vision, a vampire, or a zombie, and the very physical transfor

Stevenson was ever obsessed with the duplicity of man, as so many of his horror stories aptly illustrate. He was fixated on the concept of hypocrisy – the man who espouses a nobler worldview but fails to live up to his own lofty standards. Much of this could be said to emanate from his family’s religious background, and in few stories is this religious tension better dealt with than “The Merry Men.” The story will please fans of Treasure Island and Kidnapped, for while it is

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