MRS. JEKYLL

A primary school teacher diagnosed with cancer finds herself monstrously altered by her disease.

Rosy Winter is happily married to her radio-journalist husband, Charlie. Though they have no children, Rosy hopes that will soon change. In the meantime, she loves her job as a teacher working with young children, and she enjoys spending time with her baby nephew, the son of Charlie’s sister, Sally, whose worst problems seem to be an inattentive husband and a busy postpartum life. As the novel begins, Rosy pities Sally—then all her own contentment is transformed the day she finds a lump in her breast in the shower. Sally takes her to a tarot card reader; Rosy turns up The Empress and The Devil. The reader warns Rosy of “temptation, urges, the darkness within everyone.…Embracing our urges can be freeing, but we must be cautious not to lose ourselves in the darkness.” From that symbolic, ominous moment, the story shoots off into a feminist body-horror fever dream. A hyperlyrical take on the Jekyll and Hyde story, Glass’ novel imagines that, instead of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll taking a serum that turns him into the murderous Mr. Hyde, the chemo infusions bring forth the rageful and libidinous Nola, a kind of deadly doppelgänger for Rosy. Glass, who works as a nurse, is terrifyingly attuned to the dark poetics of rot and illness. The sections from Nola’s perspective, are, in fact, written in verse: “Fingers glistening with decay / Lump / Thumping / Throbbing / Purulent.” Fans of Glass’ saturated prose and gothic sensibilities will find more to love here; new readers will be in for a nearly hallucinogenic and harrowing look at the ravages of terminal illness.

A feminist revision of a classic written with prose as lush and dark as velvet.