Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a classic novel which we should all read.

A pop culture misnomer, due to an influential film version of the novella, is that The Strange Case’s main theme is schizophrenia, where Dr Jekyll is portrayed having “multiple personality disorder”.  In the novel however, Dr Jekyll is dealing with his inner desires which he is afraid to pursue in fear that someone would slander his name if recognised and be rejected from polite and respectable Victorian society. So he creates a substance that splits his good and evil personas apart, thus creating the mysterious and sinister Mr Hyde. The true beauty of the novel is the execution of it and the “slow burn effect” it uses. The ‘slow burn effect’ is a sequence of strange and often unrelated events that the reader goes through, which builds up the suspense for the climax where the secret is revealed and ties up all the loose ends of the story.