Olalla Top Story - January 2024
"Olalla" was published the same year (1885) that Robert Louis Stevenson conceived of the immortal Jekyll and Hyde, and it reflects his obsessions with the grim side, the gothic side of life, which must have infused the nightmares that inspired both of these stories. Hyde is a tale of a primitive demon lurking within the most placid and intellectually mild of human beings, exteriorizing in a way that is visceral and real--a lurking "killing machine" that questions whether or not the "enemy within" (as it was so denoted in an old episode of "Star Trek," wherein Kirk is split "in two" by the transporter, coming out in both a sputtering, vacillating, and cowardly form, and a hyper-aggressive bestial one) can ever be truly subsumed; after all, the "beast within" assured survival of an ever-evolving sentient ape, goading it into besting its competitors for mastery of the world. Man, the Animal, reigns ascendant, making way for Man the Thinker, Man the Rationalist; who still, unaccountably, kills his brother and his brother's children out of sheer barbarous stupidity and greed. C'est la vie.