What if every monster ever thought of was really one monster?

Mary Shelley wrote about a creature stitched together from the dead and brought to life by a man who couldn’t face what he’d made. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about a doctor who split himself in two and lost control of the darker half. Oscar Wilde wrote about a man whose portrait aged while he did not. These stories have lived separately for over a century — taught in classrooms, adapted on stages and screens, treated as distinct parables about science, repression, and vanity.

Jekyll; or, The Doctor’s Records asks: what if they were never separate at all?

This literary gothic novel reimagines Shelley’s Frankenstein as the origin point of a much larger story — one that threads through the classics of nineteenth-century horror and the lives of the authors who wrote them. The monsters of the gothic canon are not allegories here. They are memories. And they belong to one voice: a man who has survived for over two hundred years under names the reader already knows, writing a confession no one asked for and no one may believe.

The novel is structured as a private manuscript — the doctor’s records, kept hidden, now finally surfacing. It moves through the gaslit streets of Victorian London, through the salons where Wilde held court, through the decades of reinvention and moral compromise that follow when a man cannot die and cannot forget what he is. The prose is immersive and confessional, building dread not through shock but through the slow, suffocating weight of a consciousness that has lived too long with its own secrets.

At its heart, this is a novel about duality, identity, and the cost of repression. It asks whether atonement is possible when the sins span centuries — and whether the stories we tell about monsters have always been a way of avoiding the truth about ourselves.

Jekyll; or, The Doctor’s Records is the first book in a series. The world it opens is far larger than any single classic, and the story it begins does not end here.

For readers who loved the dark literary atmosphere of Mexican Gothic, the moral complexity of The Secret History, the uncanny interiority of Piranesi, and the gothic menace of Plain Bad Heroines.

Every reader has a self they perform and a self they hide. This is the book for both.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Theodore Siren is a Navy veteran, author, and educator based in Northwest Florida. He holds an M.A. in Literature and a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of West Florida, where he has taught literature and creative writing as an adjunct. His academic work explores the power of storytelling as a tool for healing — a conviction shaped by his own military service and his experience facilitating creative writing workshops for veterans.

His debut novel, Jekyll; or, The Doctor’s Records, is the first book in a literary gothic series that reimagines the classics of nineteenth-century horror — Shelley, Stevenson, Wilde — not as separate stories, but as one. Drawing on the tradition he studied and now teaches, Siren writes atmospheric, psychologically charged fiction where the dread builds slowly and the questions don’t resolve easily. His prose favors confession over spectacle, and his stories linger long after the last page.