The Suicide Club & Other Dark Adventures by Robert Louis Stevenson (Tartarus Press, 2016) Limited Edition Hardcover

 While ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde’ has passed into the collective consciousness, many of Stevenson’s weird tales, although of seminal importance to the genre, have long been forgotten. This book seeks to redress the balance, bringing back into print the more obscure stories and collecting together the better-known into one volume.

 Stevenson’s range and inventiveness is breathtaking; from the sheer recklessness and swagger of ‘The Suicide Club’ stories to the more subtle terrors of ‘Olalla’; from the macabre horror of ‘The Body Snatcher’ to the exuberance and exoticism of ‘The Isle of Voices’. Even ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ has the capacity to surprise the careful re-reader with its moral complexity, its inner qualities. Over a century after they were written, Stevenson’s stories brim with sophistication and power.

 And who can long resist Stevenson’s ‘overt relish for the storyteller’s art’, his mastery of style and content and his ‘swagger in the face of the mundane and the sordidly material.’ ‘. . . The excitement, the fierce joy, the delight in strangeness, the pleasure in deep and dark adventures . . .’: all these burn as brightly today as they have ever done.

 Contents: ‘Introduction', 'The Plague-Cellar', 'A Lodging for the Night', 'Will o’ the Mill', 'The Suicide Club: 'Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts', 'Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk', 'The Adventure of the Hansom Cabs', 'he Rajah’s Diamond: 'Story of the Bandbox', 'Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders', 'Story of the House with the Green Blind', 'The Adventure of Prince Florizel and a Detective', 'Thrawn Janet', 'The Body Snatcher', 'The Merry Men', 'Markheim', 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', 'Olalla' 'The Bottle Imp', 'The Isle of Voices', 'The Waif Woman', Fables: 'The Devil and the Innkeeper', 'The Yellow Paint', 'The House of Eld', 'The Man and his Friend' 'The Reader', 'The Distinguished Stranger', 'Something in it', 'Faith, Half Faith and No Faith at all', 'The Touchstone', 'The Poor Thing', 'The Song of the Morrow’.

 Review

'The Suicide Club and Other Dark Adventures could hardly be improved upon. It is a substantial collection of Robert Louis Stevenson’s short fiction and shows the haunting hold that the strange, weird and macabre had on his imagination. You will find herein many wonderful and exemplary instances of the storyteller’s art, by a writer whose admirers have included Henry James, Borges, Graham Greene, Nabokov, Harry Mathews and many another writer besides.' - Paul Kane, The Compulsive Reader.