Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It’s amazingly intricate and perfectly structured, and even though now we know the twist – we know that Doctor Jekyll is Mr Hyde – it still works. I assume that when it was first published it must have been like Fight Club or The Sixth Sense where people who had read it would tell their friends, you won’t believe the ending of this. You will never see it coming because it is completely out of left field.
Your last book is very much another classic.
Yes, I think that of all the great horror texts – Dracula, Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, Jekyll and Hyde – this is the best written. Stevenson is one of the most natural writers who ever lived. All his stories have this great ancient-mariner-grab-you-by-the-lapels thing. You think about the three beggars coming to the inn at the start of Treasure Island. Jekyll and Hyde has a good start as well. There is this guy who is out for a walk late at night and he sees this strange man trampling a child, which is still taboo and horrible all these years on. It’s amazingly intricate and perfectly structured and even though now we know the twist – we know that Doctor Jekyll is Mr Hyde – it still works. I assume that when it was first published it must have been like Fight Club or The Sixth Sense where people who had read it would tell their friends, you won’t believe the ending of this. You will never see it coming because it is completely out of left field.
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Kim Newman is an expert on horror and sci-fi cinema and a regular contributing editor to Sight and Sound and Empire magazines. He has published over 20 novels, plus many short stories and non-fiction works, and has won awards including International Horror Guild Award for Coppola’s Dracula and the British Fantasy Society Award for Where the Bodies are Buried. His work is often irreverently referential and he says that his novel Anno Dracula is literally a vampire book because it takes from other books and bleeds them dry.
