Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. A lawyer named Utterson hears a story about a man who trampled a small girl in the street, and paid her family a hundred pounds to make it go away. The cheque bears the name of a man he knows: his own friend, the respected physician Henry Jekyll.

So begins Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella, one of the strangest and most compact stories ever written in English. Utterson begins to ask careful, patient questions. A face at a window. A door in a blank wall that opens onto a laboratory. A will with an impossible condition in it. And always the same name, spoken with revulsion by everyone who says it: Edward Hyde.

Stevenson wrote the book in a few feverish days, and it shows — the prose is fast, the imagery is physical, and the dread never lets up. It has been read as a Gothic thriller, as a story about addiction, and as an account of a respectable man keeping his worst self in a separate room. It works as all three at once.

The structure is a pleasure in itself: the story is told almost entirely from outside, through documents, letters and witnesses, until the final two chapters hand the microphone to the people who know what actually happened. The last sixty pages explain everything the first hundred have been circling.

This unabridged recording uses the complete original text as published in 1886. It is short enough to finish in a single sitting, and a good place to start if you have only ever met these characters through film. Narrated in a single voice by Alex Mercer.