Shorter Scottish fiction - Robert Louis Stevenson

Ever since its first appearance in 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
has proved itself to be a tale of undiminished power for readers all
over the world. It remains one of the great masterpieces of
psychological fiction and yet it is not alone in Stevenson's work, for
he had explored similar themes in several other stories too, all
inextricably linked with his native country.

This collection
makes a strong case for the essentially Scottish origins of Stevenson's
best short fiction, derived as it is from Calvinism's feeling for the
immanence of evil, and driven by a sense of man's darker, divided self
which goes back to Hogg's Justified Sinner. Thus it is that the
story of the respectable Dr Jekyll, even in a London setting, has links
that stretch back to the narrow wynds of Edinburgh and the bleak moors
and shores of the North.

In this company stories of possession,
doubleness and terror such as 'The Merry Men', 'The Body Snatcher',
'Markheim', 'Thrawn Janet' and others, reveal more clearly than ever
their Scottish roots, and that fascination with the uncanny which
brought the creator of Mr Hyde screamingly awake one winter's night over
a hundred years ago.