Hyde

by Marc Estrin

Hyde lives! (It’s only the well-meaning Jekyll who is dead.) Cloak and cudgel discarded, he is now a suitably smooth operator. But as Mike Tyson observes in the epigraph, “Everybody’s got a plan until he gets punched in the mouth.”

254 pages, Paperback

Published November 11, 2016

About the author

Marc Estrin is an author, cellist, and political activist living in Burlington, Vermont. He has published four novels, and a memoir of his thirty-five years of working with the Bread & Puppet Theater."

Reviews

[Bob Sommer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full disclosure: Marc Estrin is the editor and publisher of my last two books at Fomite Press. That said, I wouldn’t post a word here if I hadn’t enjoyed this witty and wild romp through his 2016 novel, Hyde. That Hyde, more or less. Mr. Hyde, now reincarnated as Charlie Hyde, an ambitious and mendacious used car salesman (a redundancy?) in the early and mid-twentieth century of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, New Jersey, who from the background joins a cast of unique characters. Setting Charlie Hyde’s IQ at a lofty 163, Marc plunges into the challenge of portraying a character of genius and expansive reading, and he’s up to the task, wandering with lusty abandon from Kant and Nietzsche, unapologetically through sprinklings of Latin, German, and French, and on to Bach, Mahler, and Elvis Presley in prose that tumbles forward, smiling and grinning all the way, leaving sputtering laughs in its wake, and daring readers not to turn the page. Hyde is a delight! Don’t miss it.