Relatos de terror y misterio

Robert Louis Stevenson passed to posterity as the author of adventure books, but, above all, he left a permanent mark on the collective imagination with a series of timeless stories and novels, starring characters who continue to perfectly embody conflicts. fundamentals of human nature, and written with that penetrating clarity of the vision of genius: the same that we find in all the great writers of the lineage of Cervantes and Shakespeare, who have managed to make art more inimitable from the most immense and profound sense of humanity. The three works included in this volume, already read as horror stories or as moral fables, as they are both, are representative of the author's literary personality, as well as a clear exponent of the highest levels of his imagination and his talent. "The strange case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" shows the permanent fascination that moral ambiguities exerted on Stevenson. Heir to James Hogg's "Memoirs of a Sinner," she belongs in her own right to a lineage of works in which the fantastic serves to provide an unprecedented perspective on the human condition that was already in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and without which an immediate Victorian descendant could not be understood as "The Portrait of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde. "Olalla" was the fruit of a dream, and that catalytic power of irrational and dreamlike consciousness glides in its atmosphere. "Markheim" is a tale of the most refined technical perfection, in which echoes of Shakespeare's Macbeth resonate, where the traditional reason for the diabolical pact becomes a story of fall and redemption. "Stevenson was aware of the moral ambiguities of human nature and the difficulties in drawing absolute moral distinctions, which never seemed necessary to him"