Jek/Hyde

by Amy Ross

  So many innocent moments have taken on new meaning in light of the terrible knowledge Jek left me with.

  As painful as it all is, there’s a certain grim satisfaction that comes with understanding at last. After months of constantly doubting my own mind and perceptions, I finally feel sane again. Ever since I first met Hyde, I’d had the feeling there was something unnatural about him and his relationship to Jek, but Jek kept telling me not to worry about it, that it was nothing. Something in me always knew that wasn’t right. I’ve lost so much in this ordeal, but in discovering the truth, I feel as though I’ve won a part of myself back.

  Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what Jek said to me before he died—about how he and Hyde weren’t all that different in the end. I didn’t want to believe that at first; I couldn’t accept it. It was so much easier to preserve Jek in my memory as perfectly good and pure and innocent, but no one is really that simple. The more I think about it, the more I realize how similar Jek and Hyde really were. They were both scientific in their approach to the world. Hyde didn’t bother with chemistry, but he was relentless in his curiosity about other people, obsessively cataloging and enacting their most secret desires. He and Jek both craved knowledge, but Jek lacked the confidence to take his investigations outside the laboratory. Hyde allowed him to do that.

  I miss Jek so much...but I find more and more that I miss Hyde, too. For a while, I couldn’t think of Hyde as anything but the monster who took Jek from me...but Hyde also recognized something in me I never wanted to admit to—a part of me that’s attracted to danger, that craves knowledge and experience, even against my own better judgment. The part that screwed around on my devoted boyfriend when he went missing; the part that hardly hesitated before stealing Hyde’s phone and hacking into Jek’s secrets. Hyde forced me to acknowledge a darkness I wanted to deny in myself...and in his way, he taught me to appreciate and respect that side of me as much as any other.

  Next year I’ll be going off to college. Somehow through all this turmoil, I’ve managed to take my mother’s advice and stay focused on my studies and my scholarship applications. Everyone in the family is assuming I’ll go into computer science or some sort of tech field. They don’t know that I’ve picked out a couple of chemistry courses for next semester. It was never my best subject, but then, my whole life I was comparing myself to Jek. Now some part of me feels compelled to take it up. To, if I can, carry on his work. With his passion for understanding the universe, it must have tortured him to know that the thing that was destroying him was beyond his comprehension.

  I owe it to Jek to seek out the truth he couldn’t uncover.

  If I can find it—if I can isolate that mysterious compound that caused Jek’s transformations—what doors might that open? Jek’s experiment produced results beyond his wildest imagining, but there is still so much left untested. What effects might his drug have on a different subject? On me, for example. Would I split off and produce another Hyde, or someone completely different?

  I can’t stop wondering what my own shadow-self would be like...

  And I can’t wait to meet her.

  * * * * *

  Author’s Note

  One of my earliest memories is of watching a cartoon on TV—I think it was Woody Woodpecker, but it might have been Bugs Bunny—in which a character drank a colorful solution from a test tube and physically changed into a dark, looming, threatening beast. It was meant for kids, but even so, the sinister imagery haunted my dreams that night, and I woke up screaming.

  That was probably my first encounter with Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or one of its many adaptations. It certainly wasn’t the last. The story showed up in dozens of different versions—in film, on TV, even in comics. The Incredible Hulk is almost certainly a deliberate homage. Jekyll and Hyde beats even Dracula for the number of adaptations it has spawned.

  What’s even more remarkable is how much the character comes up in conversation. A friend talking about a difficult ex-boyfriend, given to mood swings, might describe him as “like Jekyll and Hyde.” Sports commentators pull up the comparison, too, any time a player is very good in some games, and very bad in others. “Which will we get today,” they ask, “Jekyll or Hyde?”

  Thanks to all these casual references, I grew up feeling like I had a pretty good understanding of the story. I never read it, because I didn’t think I had to. I already knew the basic idea: mad scientist invents a potion that splits him into a good guy and a bad guy. If I sometimes had trouble remembering whether Jekyll was good and Hyde was bad, or the other way around, that seemed like a small detail.

  It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I actually read the original story, when it was assigned by my professor in a course on Gothic Literature. Even then, I resisted it. I already knew the big twist in the story! Wouldn’t it be boring?

  It wasn’t. It didn’t matter that I already knew where the story was going, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was gripping all the same—maybe even better than it would have been if I’d come to it as an innocent, puzzling out the clues on my own. I was surprised at how chilling I found the hints and rumors of Hyde’s terrible deeds, and how suspenseful it was to await Utterson’s discovery of the unthinkable truth of Hyde’s identity. In Stevenson’s telling, the story took on life: this was no banal cautionary tale about the dangers of repressed emotion, but a truly disturbing investigation into the composition of the human psyche.

  I’d been misled, I realized, by so many film adaptations that used one actor to play both Jekyll and Hyde. Even with elaborate makeup changes, this approach always leads viewers to feel like it’s a story of one man with a mixed-up personality. In the original version, though, Jekyll and Hyde are so physically different that they could not possibly be played by the same actor. I realized, as I read, how crucial that detail is to the horror of the story. Hyde is more than a mask or a disguise—he’s an entirely different person.

  It was perhaps this angle more than any other that made me want to revisit the story. I wanted to put my own spin on it, but even more, I wanted to remind people exactly what was so weird and creepy about the original. Updating the story to the modern era was an important part of that. The dark, dirty corners of Victorian London felt sinister and menacing to Stevenson’s readers, but now they feel foreign and quaint, like something out of a fairy tale. I wanted to honor Stevenson by helping modern readers see his story with fresh eyes, and fully grasp the palpable threat of the original.

  Part of doing that was finding modern analogues for various elements of the Victorian story. Handwritten notes became text messages, of course. By the same token, a pivotal handwriting analysis in the original turned into a mobile phone hack in my story. Jekyll’s butler Poole became Jek’s mother Puloma (which did require a fair bit of rewriting, since moms don’t really act like servants). A walking stick became a bicycle lock. One element that couldn’t be saved was the last will and testament that Jekyll creates and amends at various points in the original story. I just couldn’t conceive of a believable reason for a teenager to have a will or anything like it, so I had to do away with that.

  In expanding the story, I also gave a bit more detail about Hyde’s activities when he’s on the prowl. The original story can be frustratingly coy about what exactly Hyde does that is so terrible. I wanted to give a few more hints, but without venturing into excessive, lurid descriptions. Part of the fun of this story, after all, is leaving the worst bits to the reader’s imagination.

  Lastly, setting it among high school students felt like a good way to raise the stakes of the story. While most adults these days have a certain amount of privacy and independence in their lives, adolescents are constantly being watched, monitored and judged by parents, teachers and even their peers. Teenagers, I felt, would immediately understand the appeal of becoming someone else for a f
ew hours, and being free from the judgments and responsibilities associated with your primary identity.

  For all these changes, though, it was important to me to keep the story grounded in Stevenson’s vision. I took it on as a challenge to keep my version as close as possible to his—with characters, plot points, scenes and even patches of dialogue paralleling the original—but with all the force and vitality the story had in Stevenson’s day. I hope that reading this version brings more people back to the original, and helps them realize that they don’t know that story as well as they think they do.

  Q&A

  Were you worried about people guessing the ending, based on familiarity with the original story?

  I didn’t worry about this at all. As a reader, I’ve never been very concerned about “spoilers”—in fact, I’ve been known to flip to the back of a book to read the ending before I’m halfway through! To me, the most interesting thing about a story is not the surprise at the end, but the journey you take to get there. Sometimes knowing where a story is headed can help you get more out of it, because you get to watch all the pieces falling into place and see how each decision the characters make builds to the conclusion.

  The original story was structured as a kind of mystery—when it first came out, no one knew the ending, so part of the fun was trying to use clues in the story to figure out where it was all going. That’s how mysteries work. When I decided to revisit the story, I approached it not as a mystery but as a tragedy. In a tragedy, the reader knows going in that everything will end badly, and the horror comes from watching it happen and being powerless to stop it. (This is also a form of dramatic irony.)

  Of course, I was aware that some readers might not have any familiarity with these characters, so I tried to keep that in mind and make the story work for them, too. But even for those readers, I wasn’t trying to surprise them with the ending. I didn’t want to shock readers so much as give them a creeping sense of dread.

  What was the hardest part of writing this story?

  Probably the hardest thing about writing a story like this is that the narrator doesn’t really know what’s going on until the very end. I tried to just sit down and write the story from Lulu’s perspective, but I kept getting twisted up, trying to keep track of what she would know when, what other characters knew and what they would unwittingly reveal. In order for the whole story to make sense, I had to sow a lot of details into the plot that Lulu wouldn’t understand at the time, but would become important once she found out the truth about Jek.

  I needed to know exactly what Jek and Hyde were up to throughout the story, even when Lulu had no idea. I struggled with how to manage this for a while, until eventually I realized the only solution was to write out the whole story from Jek’s point of view. Then I went back to writing Lulu’s story, but I was able to insert details into the background about what Jek/Hyde was doing at various key moments. So basically, in order to write this book, I had to write two books—one from Lulu’s perspective, and one from Jek’s.

  The original story is told from the point of view of a man named Utterson. Why did you write this story from a female point of view?

  One of the things I’ve always found interesting about the original story is that almost every single character is a man. Not just Jekyll and Hyde, but all of Jekyll’s friends, family members, colleagues and servants. That’s not just because it was written a long time ago—even in the nineteenth century, lots of books had major female characters. So I’ve always wondered why Stevenson made this choice. I still don’t have any definite answer.

  I thought about keeping this odd detail when I updated the story, but in a modern story it felt too distracting. It was impossible for me to imagine a story in which my Jek wouldn’t interact with any women, so as I read through the original story, I looked for characters I could gender-swap to make it feel more realistic. First I thought of making Jek female, but that’s been done before, and I felt like it would shift the emphasis of the story and make it about gender, which wasn’t what I wanted. Instead, I wound up making almost every other major character female, to balance out the insistent masculinity at the center of the story.

  In the book, Jek is biracial, and Hyde’s racial identity seems to fluctuate. Why did you make this choice?

  When I first started working on the book, I took a lot of time to figure out who Jek was, and how Hyde would contrast with that. I liked the idea that Jek was already this complicated, conflicted person, before Hyde even existed. It’s not the fact that Jek is biracial that gives him a “doubled” identity—it’s the cultural context he lives in, where everyone around him has expectations of what it means to be Indian and what it means to be Black. Even before his experiment, Jek struggles with the pressures to conform to and resist those incompatible stereotypes.

  When it came to creating Hyde as a character, I was interested in the fact that Hyde is a man without a history. I couldn’t settle on any one race for Hyde, because he doesn’t have parents, or a community, or official documentation, or even a full name. Hyde literally has no background, and that’s part of what’s fascinating/unsettling about him. This indeterminacy is both part of his mysterious appeal, and also what makes him a little eerie and off-putting—he doesn’t fit properly into human culture.

  Hyde’s racial fluidity is liberating for Jek, but also eye-opening and sometimes horrifying. People around Hyde tend to read him as whatever suits their impressions and prejudices in that moment, allowing him to get away with crimes that would be impossible in Jek’s body. In that way, the whole story is an extreme, nightmarish examination of the consequences of racial privilege.

  But privilege is anything but simple in this story. There’s race privilege examined here, but there are also the privileges (and lack thereof) associated with class, money, education, gender and ability. I wanted to portray the full complexity of that matrix. For example, Jek is in many ways disadvantaged by being dark-skinned, but he is relatively privileged in terms of money, class, family support and gender. Lulu is lacking in some of those vectors of privilege, which she doesn’t want to see—she’d like to imagine herself and Jek as more or less equals. But her mom is much more aware of the differences between them, and the ways in which Lulu is held to different standards (thanks mostly to being female, a first generation immigrant and poor/labor class).

  Should this story be viewed as a social critique?

  When it comes to science fiction and gothic horror, I think social critique is in the DNA of the genres. The Jekyll and Hyde story in all its forms challenges us to reflect on difference, on identity, and the restrictions and expectations placed on us by society according to our identities. These issues are as resonant for us today as they were in Stevenson’s day—perhaps even more so.

  But while I definitely had those themes in mind as I wrote, I didn’t set out to convince the reader of any simple moral lesson. My primary goal was to write a good, gripping story. A secondary goal was to raise questions and provoke discussion: How do social pressures affect our moral choices? How important is our body to our sense of identity? How do race and gender and sexuality and money and class and illness and education intersect to frame how we see ourselves, and how society sees us? What responsibility do corporations have to their workers, and to their communities? Should ethical restrictions be placed on scientific investigations?

  I don’t have clear answers to all these questions, and I don’t expect the reader to either. I’m not trying to tell anyone what to think, so much as give them interesting and provocative things to think about.

  What was your favorite scene to write?

  Every scene with Hyde was a lot of fun to write. He’s my favorite kind of character: seductive, uninhibited, mysterious and potentially vicious. He can get away with saying and doing all kinds of things ordinary characters won’t. I had to stop myself from letting him take over the story
—with a character like that, a little goes a long way, and I think he’s more powerful in small doses.

  Another scene I really enjoyed was the one in the butterfly pavilion. It’s such a dramatic setting, it gave me a lot to describe: unusual sights, sounds and smells that helped reflect and intensify the emotions between the characters. I even visited a butterfly pavilion near me to fill my senses with material for the book.

  I don’t usually play much with symbolism in my novels (not on purpose, anyway), but I couldn’t resist the parallel between butterfly metamorphosis and Jek’s physical transformations. I thought it added to the drama of the scene that Jek felt as though Lulu was talking about him, even though Lulu didn’t know his secret yet.

  What was the biggest change from the original story?

  I tried to keep the basic meat of the story as close as to the original as possible, given the different setting. That was a fun challenge—especially finding modern parallels for things like telegrams and handwriting and butlers.

  One thing I knew I wanted to change, though, was the way the mystery is revealed at the end. In the original story, the truth is finally revealed in two long letters. This is a pretty standard device in stories from the time, but I didn’t think it would work in my version. It felt too indirect; it robbed us of the drama of a final confrontation between Jek and Lulu. I wanted Jek to confess his secret to Lulu face-to-face, and I wanted her to see him transform once before he died.