One of the great classics of the horror genre — which I’d read before, but when I heard that there was a recording of the story by Sir Christopher Lee, I just had to have it. And Lee more than delivers on the promise associated with his name alone. No wide-eyed, flamboyantly-gestured horror movie antics here (or their audio equivalent), just great empathy for all of the characters involved — and for none more so than for the unfortunate, tragically overreaching Dr. Jekyll.
Never mind the story’s one minor logical inconsistency — by which I’m not referring to its central premise, the notion of (even physically) splitting apart a man’s personality into its “good” and its “evil” components (reject that, and the story falls apart entirely, obviously), but if Hyde is initially significantly smaller in stature than Jekyll because his is, or has heretofore been the less dominant part of Jekyll’s personality, shouldn’t Hyde then grow in stature, too, as his influence over Jekyll grows? — this is rightfully a classic of the genre, and a cautionary moral tale to boot; and in an age that has made the manipulation of human genetic material easier than ever, also eerily timely … not to mention that it brilliantly shows that “horror” does not have to involve bucketfuls of blood oozing from the pages in order to achieve a truly terrifying effect; psychology and atmosphere, if as brilliantly executed as here, really does it all. (Oh, yes, of course there is the one brutal murder committed by Hyde, but let’s be honest, that doesn’t even come close to the real life horror that would be spread, barely two years later, by Jack the Ripper; and it certainly hasn’t got a dime’s worth on our latter days’ slasher yarns.)
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