Tales and Fantasies
1905
Stevenson scholars have long known that his genius extended far beyond Jekyll and Hyde. This posthumous collection gathers three stories that never appeared together during his lifetime, each showcasing a different facet of his extraordinary range. "The Body Snatcher" remains one of the most unsettling tales in English literature, a gravedigger's Faustian bargain that crawls under the skin and stays there. "The Misadventures of John Nicholson" offers something rarer: Stevenson's comic voice, sharp and satirical, following a Cambridge-educated fool through an afternoon of spectacularly bad decisions that reveal the cruelty lurking beneath Victorian respectability. "The Story of a Lie" completes the triptych with psychological precision, examining how one deception spirals into another until truth becomes indistinguishable from invention. Published in 1905, the year after Stevenson's death in Samoa, this collection captures a master at work across registers that rarely appear together in one volume: horror, comedy, and moral dissection. For readers who believe they know Stevenson only through his famous novella, this book reveals a writer of startling versatility.
