Seltsame Fall des Dr. Jekyll und Mr. Hyde

by Oscar Wilde

Like Jekyll and Hyde, Wilde constructs a narrative around a protagonist's hidden corruption—but where Stevenson uses science as the mechanism, Wilde uses aestheticism and moral decay as a slow-motion mirror. Both explore the Victorian anxiety about what lurks beneath a respectable exterior, though Wilde's prose is deliberately ornate where Stevenson's is taut and urgent.

by Keith Russell Ablow, MD

This is the surprise pick: it's a contemporary fantasy that borrows Stevenson's exact narrative DNA—a secret scientific experiment gone wrong, a protagonist hiding a dangerous transformation, and that same claustrophobic sense of being trapped by one's own nature. But Suri sets it in Mughal-inspired fantasy worldbuilding, giving you that delicious disorientation of familiar psychological horror in an unfamiliar setting.

by Jean-Pierre Naugrette

Collins pioneered the detective novel around the same era Stevenson was writing, and The Moonstone shares that same propulsive mystery-box structure where you're constantly revising your understanding of what's really happening. Where Jekyll and Hyde conceals its revelation in plain sight through narrative misdirection, Collins layers multiple perspectives to keep you perpetually off-balance about who the villain actually is.

by H. G. Wells

Wells takes Stevenson's premise of a scientific experiment that unleashes something uncontrollable and pushes it outward—instead of internal duality, the invisibility becomes a weapon that isolates and corrupts. Both novels use their central conceit as a metaphor for power without accountability, but Wells's protagonist is far more actively destructive, making this feel like a darker answer to Jekyll's tragedy.

by Hana Sambrook

This 1848 novel predates Jekyll and Hyde by decades, but it's criminally overlooked—it explores the same territory of hidden identity and moral judgment, except Brontë's protagonist is hiding from society's cruelty rather than from her own nature. The narrative structure mirrors Stevenson's use of documents and testimony to slowly reveal what's really happening, but with a protagonist whose "monstrousness" is entirely in the eye of a judgmental Victorian beholder.