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    The Body Snatcher
    The Body Snatcher
    The Body Snatcher
    Ebook45 pages38 minutes

    The Body Snatcher

    By Robert Louis Stevenson and Otto Penzler

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    An uncanny thriller from the acclaimed author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

    Medical school students Fettes and Macfarlane are charged with the unenviable task of receiving and paying for the institution’s research cadavers. When Fettes recognizes the dead body of a woman he saw alive and well just the day before, he suspects murder. Macfarlane, however, insists that the authorities would never believe they had nothing to do with her death. Reluctantly, Fettes agrees to keep quiet, but soon regrets his decision when another familiar corpse turns up—and takes on a life of its own.
     
    This ebook features a new introduction by Otto Penzler and has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMysteriousPress.com Open Road
    Release dateDec 22, 2015
    ISBN9781480490970
    Author

    Robert Louis Stevenson

    Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born on 13 November 1850, changing his second name to ‘Louis’ at the age of eighteen. He has always been loved and admired by countless readers and critics for ‘the excitement, the fierce joy, the delight in strangeness, the pleasure in deep and dark adventures’ found in his classic stories and, without doubt, he created some of the most horribly unforgettable characters in literature and, above all, Mr. Edward Hyde.

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    Reviews for The Body Snatcher

    3.5/5

    53 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Again had the wonderful atmosphere so many newer authors lack. Was creepy and fun at the same time. If you can handle the idea of grave robbing and body snatching then this is an excellent way to spend a short amount of time
    • 4/5
      As I was reading this book the thought that was going through my mind was how doctors in the 19th Century would, during the middle of the night, raid graveyards for freshly buried corpses, exhume them, and take them back to their laboratories to dissect them. This story however goes a little further because it is suggested that the main character goes beyond exhuming freshly buried corpses to creating his own corpses.However, as I thought about the idea in this book, I came to realise how similar this story is to The Wolf of Wall Street. The reason I say this is because both of the main characters seem to go into a very grey world (actually, that is putting it very lightly because the actions of both of these characters are highly illegal) to become successful in their various trades. With the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort practices stock manipulation, high pressure selling, and multiple other acts of stock fraud to become a multi-millionaire. In this story MacFarlane resorts to murder to obtain the bodies that he requires to be able to study medicine.I would not be surprised if this happened quite regularly in Victorian England because back in those days one generally did not leave their body to science for study and the ability to obtain corpses to perform autopsies was very difficult. In fact I believe that when somebody died you generally didn't perform autopsies you simply buried the body and were done with it.I was included to connect this story with the legend of Jack the Ripper, until I discovered that Jack the Ripper was haunting the streets of London four years after this book was published. However, consider this, Jack, whoever he was, would select prostitutes as his targets (namely people that would not go missing, and not important enough to appear on the police's radar) and, as the story goes, would bit by bit remove parts of their body and place them around the corpse. This does not sound like the act of some psychotic serial killer, but rather the actions of a doctor, or a scientist, who was going out of his way to study the human body. Actually, I believe that one of the suspects in the case was a doctor.The story seems to be told from the perspective of a man named Fettes who gets caught up in this rather gruesome series of events, though as I suggested, it was not simply exhuming corpses from the graves, but rather creating corpses so that at a later time one can then exhume them. Obviously if one is doing this one needs to get to the corpse pretty quickly after it has been buried because if one waits too long then the corpse begins to decay and become useless. Obviously this is something that belongs in the past because these days you can hand your corpse over to science so that they can study it.
    • 3/5
      (1884) Great set-up, excellent writing... but the 'scary' ending didn't work for me at all. I felt like it was on the level of spooky stories kids tell each other during sleepover parties (do kids still do that?)
      It's about some young medical students whose duty to procure dead bodies for their eminent professor leads them down a spiral of moral depravity and blackmail. A nice exploration of guilt and complicity.
    • 4/5
      I found every single part highly interesting but I didn't like the ending. However, it's a great ending the thing is that I loved the book so much that I wish it could've gone on just a bit more.

    Book preview

    The Body Snatcher - Robert Louis Stevenson

    Robert Louis Stevenson

    Although widely recognized as a writer of adventure fiction for boys, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) also wrote several classics of mystery, crime, and suspense fiction. The best known, of course, is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but readers have enjoyed his other novels and short story collections that contain mysteries as well, including The Wrong Box, New Arabian Nights, The Body Snatcher, and The Wrecker.

    Born in Edinburgh, the son of Margaret Isabella (Balfour) and Thomas Stevenson, an engineer, he was christened Robert Lewis Balfour but adopted his more familiar name at eighteen. Constantly ill, he received a spotty education. He discontinued his engineering studies at the University of Edinburgh due to lack of interest, and although he later passed his bar examinations, he never practiced law. Stevenson moved several times because of his lung disease, and was living in a French artists’ colony in 1876 when he fell in love with Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a woman ten years his senior with three children from an unhappy marriage. Three years after their meeting, he followed her to California, where he suffered a traveling accident that would affect him for the rest of his life. They were married in 1880, returning to Europe to live in Scotland, Switzerland, and France. After returning to the United States for another year, the Stevensons sailed for the South Seas in 1888 and, two years later, settled in Samoa, where he would spend the rest of his life.

    Stevenson wrote some of the most famous and popular books for boys in all literature, notably Treasure Island (1883), Prince Otto (1885), Kidnapped (1886), The Black Arrow (1888), and The Master of Ballantrae (1889), as well as the still-beloved volume of poetry A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885). He ventured into the mystery-crime field at every stage of his literary career, beginning with a collection of stories, New Arabian Nights (1882), which included such classic tales as The Suicide Club and The Pavilion on the Links, which were models of romantic roguery. Three years later he produced More New Arabian Nights in collaboration with his wife; one of the stories in this collection, The Dynamiter, is often reprinted.

    In 1886 Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a macabre allegory once described as the only crime story in which the solution is more terrifying than the problem. In this classic tale of a dual personality, Dr. Henry Jekyll, a brilliant doctor and chemist, is obsessed with the concept of one person possessing two separate and distinct personalities. Experimenting with drugs, he is able to prove his

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