The dark thread woven through The Gold Pawn
“All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.”
This time of year, with the onset of the warm colors of autumn, making desserts and meals that are cozy like apple crisp and pot roast, with the spookiness of Halloween in the air…I love to revisit the second book in my Art Deco Mystery Series for the spook factor of the classic novel that wraps itself around Lane Sanders.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.
I love pulling art into my books in unexpected or even forgotten ways. I’ve always felt Jekyll and Hyde was edgier and darker than most have treated it. The prose is exquisite and haunting.
“I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.”
Bugs Bunny and the like have made a caricature of Jekyll and Hyde and I do enjoy my Bugs Bunny – especially Gossamer. But the darkness that is revealed in Jekyll and Hyde becomes more evocative as the center of the tale begins to dawn upon the reader: we all have the capacity for Hyde.
“... Man is not truly one, but truly two... even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both...”
In THE GOLD PAWN, I play with Lane picking up this enticing volume as it calls to her, compels her to read its words once again as she faces her own decisions and the revelation that perhaps what she’s relied on most in her life —her intuition— cannot be trusted. Then, as the novel plays out and Lane discovers her own capacity for darkness as she makes her ultimate decision on which way to turn, the book transfers to a particular villain’s hands. We as readers get to watch two takes on this classic volume of choice, when a line is crossed and choice is no longer an option. When we least suspect it, the horror becomes: is it too late?
“My devil had been long caged, he came roaring out.”
Take a trip with Lane to both Detroit and her beloved Gotham. Let a little edgier side of this classic literature by Robert Louis Stevenson thrill your senses during this spooky season, as it works its magic within Lane and 1930s New York City.
“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but two.”