From My Reading Chair…
A delightmare! A smorgasbord of spooky prose and eerie illustrations working in sinister symbiosis!
Jekyll vs Hyde: The Potion of Doom reimagines, or rather, in my opinion, honours Stevenson’s original story, carrying its legacy into the decrepit Hyde Manor and letting a new generation go rampaging through it.
This is quintessential Jack Meggitt-Phillips storytelling: dastardly witty, totally macabre and gloriously committed to its own nonsense. Suspiciously comfortable in the company of devious characters, too... Erm, Jack, how much of this is autobiographical?!
Meggitt-Phillips clearly understands the traditions he’s playing with, but also that wonderfully childlike fascination with the gross, weird and horrible stuff. Then he has an enormous amount of fun mucking about with it all, delivering my excellence requirement, the ‘Eerie TrifectAaArGH’, in abundance! Horror, humour and oodles of hope!
I absolutely adore Mr and Mrs Jekyll’s wonderfully odd courtship. I half expected Craig David to turn up and serenade us through a deeply questionable 2026 remix of 7 Days. “Meet on Monday, fell in love by Tuesday, then by Wednesday we were separating and by Friday, also having a baby?!” Even Craig might struggle to make that a chart-topper! The couple’s polar-opposite, performance-worthy personalities make for some enormous laughs right off the bat.
And then there’s Henrik. Spoilt rotten and spectacularly pleased with himself, he’s a little horror I love to loathe. Before Eddie Hyde even arrives, Henrik is doing a perfectly good job of being a bit beastly all by himself! His reluctant friendship with Gabby introduces the inconvenience of somebody who has thoughts and feelings of her own, holding up a mirror that doesn’t simply reflect how marvellous he thinks he is. Henrik is rotten, certainly. But might he be ripe for change?
Which leads to the fact that there’s more bubbling away beneath the story’s silliness, too. What makes somebody ‘monstrous’: their appearance, their intentions or their actions? And once we’ve labelled them “good” or “beastly”, do we leave room for them to change? Seeing the world through somebody else’s eyes gives those judgements a little wobble, opening up possibilities for understanding and for doing better. Something delicious to chew on between the laughs.
And Holly Swain’s illustrations? In complete calamitous cahoots with Jack’s words from beginning to end. Her distinctive linework carries expressive characters and little details that evoke such a gothic sensibility. The glimpses of illustration leave me wanting to potter about, while the typography, scrolls and plaques help the atmosphere creep into the design of the pages themselves. I want to stare at framed portraits, inspect every jar label, lose myself in the library and hover around the laboratory concocting things I have no business concocting, especially considering I only got a double C in Science for my GCSEs!
Then we get deeper into the town’s darker secrets. Cue chaos, car crashes and community outreach and towards the end comes a tortuous twist of a reveal!
A funsettling series opener, and after that feral feast of fiction... I’m ravenous for the next helping. Until then, you’ll find me house-hunting in Gothville. There goes the neighbourhood!
Creep on Reading, Pumpkins!
