This is a story of a respected doctor’s strange connection to an evil man, and the town’s hunt to find a murderer.

I didn’t realize this was a short story until I picked it up and it was only 150 pages (eBook pages). Because of that, I don’t really know how to rate this one; I’m used to spending a lot more time in the story and with the characters. I didn’t absolutely love this one, but I didn’t hate it either.

I was pretty sure I knew what this book was about: the split personalities of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But I never imagined it happening in the way it worked out in the book. It’s kind of fun reading these classic stories that everybody “knows,” and getting to see what actually happens.

The majority of the book was written from Dr. Jekyll’s lawyer friend’s perspective, Utterson. This all started because Utterson was talking to his cousin about some creepy dude, Mr. Hyde, who beat up a kid, and everybody in town knows that Mr. Hyde has some sort of association with Dr. Jekyll. But Utterson knows it goes a step further than that because Dr. Jekyll’s will states that everything he has goes to Mr. Hyde if something were to happen to him. I love that this is one of the main things that drove Utterson to look into the situation: a will. Some things haven’t changed since 1886.

I liked how Mr. Hyde was described as this short, thin man with a cane who doesn’t necessarily look deformed, but everybody knows he has to be deformed—there’s just a certain wrongness about him. Dr. Jekyll literally turned himself into his most evil version and everything about him was wrong and people knew it. The first half (maybe 2/3) of this book was a fun mystery, but the other part was more of a philosophical conversation of good vs evil. Dr. Jekyll wrote out a letter of what he did and why he did it. It goes to show that everybody does have some good and evil in them, and the wolf that wins is the wolf that you feed.