The Possessions of Doctor Forrest

The Possessions of Doctor Forrest, by Richard T Kelly, Faber, RRP£12.99, 320 pages

Overreaching scientists whose morals lag behind their professional abilities are as much a staple of gothic horror as asylums, vampirish beauties, graveyards, doppelgängers and dead people who refuse to lie down. Richard T Kelly’s The Possessions of Doctor Forrest features all of the above and more.

The eponymous doctor is one of a trio of medical friends who have known each other since their schooldays on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Now Dr Robert Forrest has mysteriously disappeared and his old pals, Grey Lochran and Steven Hartford, are left to investigate his whereabouts. Lochran is a surgeon who reserves his scalpel for children and considers his athletic frame an extra obligation to be gentle. Hartford is less assured, a psychiatrist who, despite his socialist leanings, is director of a luxurious residential clinic favoured by rich and famous meltdowns. Hartford’s marriage is failing and he finds himself increasingly drawn towards one of his patients, troubled heiress Eloise Keaton.

Before his disappearance Dr Forrest also ministered to Eloise. She describes him as someone who masks his darkness so well “you’d let [him] take a knife to your face”. A skilled plastic surgeon, Forrest enhanced Eloise’s looks, took her as a lover and treated her with contempt. He longs instead for Malena, the Danish woman whom he refers to as his wife but never married. Shortly before Forrest vanishes, Malena abandons him for a younger man, the Irish sculptor Killean McCabe. Her defection leaves the normally vain Forrest vulnerable. The mirror shows him “drinker’s wrinkles, grey in the hair and the creeping widow’s peak”. Better then, one might think, to avoid mirrors but Robert Forrest invests in an antique cheval glass that tempts him into a Faustian pact.

There was a Victorian breadth to Richard T Kelly’s first novel Crusaders, an epic set in the late 1990s, which explored British religion, politics and the underclass through a deprived area of Newcastle. This time Kelly has embraced the gothic and he gleefully acknowledges his literary forebears. Forrest’s skill with a blade and inability to face up to what he’s unleashed are reminiscent of Dr Frankenstein. When David Tregaskis, an inmate of Hartford’s clinic, whispers “sometimes I’m a spider, scuttling into your mouth at night”, he conjures Count Dracula’s insane acolyte Renfield, and we know, if we did not already, that all is not well.

But it is The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde that is most frequently glimpsed throughout the novel. The avuncular Dr Lochran might be a relative of Jekyll’s most trusted friend Mr Utterson, who is inclined to “let my brother go to the devil in his own way”. Lochran acknowledges: “Robert and I were always an odd match ... I the guy you would go to for an onerous favour ... Robert defined by his ... sexual predation.” Like Dr Jekyll, Forrest is at the centre of the tale but his voice seems absent from the first three-quarters of the book and we experience him through reports from others. We also learn of Hyde-like wild tramplings and beatings administered by intruders into the heretofore charmed circle of friends.

It is unfair to criticise a novel for not being another book but intertextuality invites comparison and it’s startling to remember that contemporary readers of Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale would have had no clue of Jekyll and Hyde’s “closer than an eye” connection before the closing page of the novelette. Doctor Forrest’s final confession is less astounding and his motivation less revealing of our age than Jekyll’s anxious hypocrisy is of the Victorian era. But there is a pleasure in anticipating how a well-known tale will play out this time and, in The Possessions of Doctor Forrest, Richard T Kelly has put his own original stamp on the genre.

Louise Welsh is author of ‘Naming the Bones’ (Canongate)