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Books Like Jekyll and Hyde
What to read after Jekyll and Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is the foundational text of the psychological horror tradition — the Victorian doctor who separates his moral and immoral selves and discovers that Hyde is stronger. Still as disturbing as when it was written, and still the most concentrated expression of the 'double self' concept in English fiction. These novels will find you in the same territory.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
The closest Victorian contemporary to Jekyll and Hyde — published four years later, in 1890, and exploring the same divided-self theme; where Stevenson splits Jekyll into two bodies, Wilde splits Dorian's moral deterioration onto a portrait; both are Gothic fables about what happens when the respectable Victorian man's suppressed self is given license
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Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
The foundational text of English Gothic horror and the novel that most directly anticipates Jekyll and Hyde: a scientist who plays with the boundary between life and death and creates something he cannot control; where Jekyll's creation is himself, Frankenstein's creation is external; both scientists are destroyed by their experiment and both novels ask what science is permitted to do
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The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
A governess who believes she is protecting her charges from malevolent ghosts — James's most Gothic work and a deliberate engagement with the horror tradition; the ambiguity about whether the ghosts are real or psychological is the same fundamental ambiguity as the ambiguity about whether Hyde is metaphysically real or a product of Jekyll's disturbed psychology
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The Trial
by Franz Kafka
Josef K. arrested without explanation — the twentieth-century heir to the Gothic tradition Jekyll and Hyde belongs to; where Stevenson uses the horror of a doubled self, Kafka uses the horror of an incomprehensible legal apparatus; both are nightmares that feel like realism because they are drawn so precisely
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Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
The second Mrs. de Winter living in the shadow of the first — du Maurier is the major twentieth-century writer in the Gothic tradition Stevenson belongs to; Rebecca is a psychological thriller that uses a Gothic country house to explore the same questions about identity, suppression, and what is hidden beneath a respectable surface
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Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
A group of English schoolboys who revert to savagery when stranded on an island — Golding is explicitly working in the Jekyll and Hyde tradition: the thesis that beneath civilized behavior lies a savage nature that civilization merely suppresses, not eliminates; where Stevenson shows the split in a single adult gentleman, Golding shows it in children and in a group
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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Marlow's journey up the Congo to find Kurtz — Conrad is the other great late Victorian writer most explicitly working with the same material as Stevenson; Kurtz's journey from civilized European to 'the horror, the horror' is the colonial-adventure version of Jekyll's chemical experiment: what happens when the suppressed self is given permission
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The Invisible Man
by H.G. Wells
A scientist who discovers the formula for invisibility and uses it to become a criminal — Wells's most Gothic novel and the closest direct descendant of Jekyll and Hyde: another scientist who experiments on himself and creates something that destroys him; where Jekyll becomes Hyde, Griffin becomes the Invisible Man, and both lose control of their creation
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