Strange Case of Mr. Bodkin and Father Whitechapel

Book excerpt: In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson published one of the best-known stories in the English language: DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE, a dark fantasy in which a kindly doctor concocts a potion that transforms him into the living embodiment of pure evil. Now, over a century later, comes the other side of Jekyll & Hyde: a companion novel that tells the tale of ruthless banker Geoffrey Bodkin quaffing the potion and unleashing his saintly counterpart, Father Whitechapel. "What's intriguing about Jekyll & Hyde is that Stevenson clearly states that the drug itself is neither diabolical nor divine," Keller says. "It simply brings forth the repressed side of one's personality: fiend or angel. So I wondered what would happen if a wealthy but conflicted businessman took the potion and became the living, giving saint he's always longed to be?" Yet MR. BODKIN & FATHER WHITECHAPEL is no sweet fantasy, but an unsettling story of greed and charity, of embezzlement, scandal and murder. For if Father Whitechapel is beloved by the paupers of the East End, he is the stuff of nightmares for Victorian London's upper classes, who seek to stop him by any means: even branding him the city's most notorious criminal: Jack the Ripper. Integrating Stevenson's original prose, in all its Victorian splendor, as well as true events from nineteenth-century East End London, MR. BODKIN & FATHER WHITECHAPEL is a suspenseful adaptation of DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE that takes literary mash-ups to a new level of sophistication while exploring the catastrophic consequences of unhindered goodness.