Imaginary Worlds - Many Faces of Jekyll and Hyde

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

Pop culture has been full of Jekylls and Hydes: Bruce Banner and The Hulk, Norman Bates and Mother, Walter White and Heisenberg, The Nutty Professor and Buddy Love. They all echo the archetype that Robert Lous Stevenson established 140 years ago in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I explore at how these variations reflect different ideas about duality, depending on how “bad” the Hydes are and what the Jekylls choose to do about their alter egos. Lewis University professor Jamil Mustafa draws parallels between the original 1886 novel and modern stories like Twin Peaks, Fight Club, and Black Swan. Plus, I talk with Yannie ten Broeke, who teaches psychology at Touro University, about why the Jekyll and Hyde archetype reflects how little we understand our own minds. This episode is sponsored by There Is No Antimemetics Division, the national bestselling science-fiction horror novel by qntm. Get your copy now wherever books and audiobooks are sold. To support the show, you can donate on Patreon where you get access to the ad-free version and our companion show Between Imaginary Worlds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend or disbelief. I'm Eric Malinski. In the last episode, we looked at how Sherlock Holmes and John Watson have been updated to the present day. And while I was working on that episode, I realized there's another classic character or characters from the Victorian age who still live on today, but in very different ways. The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Lewis Stevenson came out in 1886. When I first read the book, the most shocking thing to me was that the big reveal that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person doesn't happen until almost the end of the book. It's kind of weird because the idea that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person has been part of our cultural language for all of our lives. Even when the book was first being adapted to the stage and then to films,

part of the appeal was seeing how an actor would play both characters. And there had been a lot of film adaptations, some with an extra twist, like doing a gender swap. In the Netflix series Wednesday, a hide is a category of creature that some people can turn into. But what really interests me is how the book established an archetype, which echoes throughout pop culture, For example, Bruce Banner and the Hulk is a Jekyll and Hyde story.

And not all these characters go through physical transformations, many of them are psychological. Once I began to make a list of all the characters in pop culture who fit this archetype, I realized that each variation says something different depending on how bad the hides are and what the Jekylls do in response to their hides. And looking at all these different variations of the same idea, we can see how our understanding of the human mind has changed over the last 140 years. Before we begin our tour of pop culture, two caveats. First, I am not diagnosing these characters with disassociative identity disorder or DID.

These are not real people. They are works of fiction, and I'm treating them like that. Second, I should probably give a spoiler alert since some of the movies and shows wait to reveal that the Jekyll and Hyde characters are the same person, but I'll be talking about stuff that came out at least 10 years ago. Let's begin with the hides. As I said, there's a sliding scale in terms of how bad the hides are. At one end of the spectrum are the hides that are deviant or inappropriate,

but not violent, like in The Nutty Professor, which came out in 1963. In the film, Jerry Lewis plays an extreme, extremely nerdy scientist. He drinks a potion that unleashes an alter ego called Buddy Love. What's interesting to me about this film is that both characters embody ideas that are part of the manosphere today, the Simp and the Chad. The Simp is the nerdy professor. He's weak, overly deferential. He's too afraid to ask out the woman that he has a crush on. Buddy Love is the Chad, the idea of a stud in the era of the rat pack. When Buddy first meets this woman that the professor was interested in, she's disgusted by him. Well, honey, I always say, if you're good and you know it, why waste time beating around a bush, true? And I always say

that to love yourself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. And after watching you, I know that you and you will be very happy together. But Buddy Love also has a level of confidence that she finds herself drawn towards. Yeah, if you don't believe in idle chatter and a lot of small talk, yeah, I'm deranged. Or would you prefer that I conduct myself like the little boys you're accustomed to dating? Well, you're not going to tell me that you're here with me now because I don't appeal to you. The movie was remade in 1996 with Eddie, Murphy, and his version of the nerdy professor is obese. And the fat jokes in that film make it

just as dated as the original film. But the scenes with Buddy Love play out the same way. In the end, both films condemn Buddy. He's exposed for being the embodiment of toxic masculinity, literally, since he was created by chemicals in a lab. Is that a test tube in my pocket? Am I just happy to see you? How jerk? Oh, you know you love it. I feel like to. There is an interesting connection to the original book by Robert Lewis Stevenson. The Hyde figure has been interpreted as a reaction against the sexual repression of the Victorian age.

But Hyde may not have represented heterosexual desires. Jamil Mustafa is a professor at Lewis University in Illinois. He says the year before Jekyll and Hyde came out, a new law went into effect that made it easier. to jail someone for homosexuality. So rather than having to prove sodomy, all they had to do was show that these men had committed an act of gross indecency, which really wasn't to find at all.

Given the really kind of fuzzy definition of gross indecency, men could be blackmailed very easily if there were letters, for example. And so this is relevant to Jekyll and Hyde because Uderson, the lawyer, seems to believe that there's an inappropriate relationship between Jekyll and Hyde. Of course, he thinks that they're two different men. And that Hyde might be blackmailing Jekyll,

because he's wondering, Uderson, is, you know, what's the source of Hy's power over Jekyll? He says, I begin to fear it was disgrace. Robert Louis Stevenson had several friends who were gay, and he was sympathetic to their dilemmas. Some of those men acted on their desires outside their marriages. Others did not. they all wrote about their struggles in letters and diaries.

One of Stevenson's friends, a critic and poet named John Addington Simmons, wrote to Stevenson after he read Jekyll and Hyde. Simmons wrote to Stevenson viewed as an allegory. It touches upon one too closely. So it seems that Simmons saw this as an allegory for his own double life. But when the book was adapted into theater and film, the gay subtext was erased. And you see this in all the adaptations, beginning with the earliest ones.

A good woman is added for Dr. Jekyll and a so-called bad one, a prostitute, is added for Mr. Hyde. The metaphor can still be applied to an identity crisis among men of any sexuality. Perfect example is the movie Fight Club from 1999. At first, it seems that Ed Norton and Brad Pitt are playing two different characters, who become friends. And there are variation on the theme of the Wimp and the Stud. But eventually we learn they're the same person. Unlike the Nuddy Professor, it's not a physical transformation.

It's a psychological break from reality. Ed Norton's character is shocked when he discovers that he was actually doing everything that Brad Pitt's character was doing. Like in an early scene, it looks like Ed Norton is watching Pitt's character, Tyler Durdon, give a speech to their secret fight club. Later on in the movie, we learned that this is actually Ed Norton imagining he's Brad Pitt. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas,

waiting tables, slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. The middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. we have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.

In this film, the Jekyll character creates his hide, not necessarily because he wants to impress women. He's questioning his overall sense of masculinity because he feels like a tiny cog in the wheel of capitalism. The TV series Mr. Robot follows a similar pattern, including the theme of not letting the system put you in a box. The main character, played by Rami Mollick, discovers that this mysterious man that he's been talking with, Mr. Robot, played by Christian Slater, is actually a psychological projection of himself. But sometimes he has trouble believing it. Direl disappeared.

No one knows where he is. But you know. So do you. You forget, kiddo. I am you. No, you're not. It's not a fact. There's another example which follows this pattern,

and it's one of the few examples where the characters are women. In the film Black Swan from 2010, Natalie Portman plays a ballet dancer who is demure and fearful. She feels a lot of pressure to push herself artistically so she can get the lead in Swan Lake and hold on to the role. Her hide is the black swan from Swan Lake. In one scene, her mother is banging on the door, and she thinks that she's literally transforming into this creature,

which is half human and half swan. In all of these stories, the hide characters are part of a messy growth process that allows the Jekylls to take actions that they wouldn't have taken otherwise. But in the end, it's a Pyrrhic victory, a dangerous form of liberation, which comes at a cost. They're looking for you. The anti-mometics division is recruiting candidates with high threat tolerance, obsessive attention to detail, and the ability to function without certainty.

Your work will be invisible. Your victories will be unprovable. Your failures will be unremembered. If you're hearing this message, you've already been cleared for intake. Welcome aboard. There is No Antimimetics Division is the national best-selling science fiction horror novel by Q&TM. The Guardian calls it an unforgettable and mind-bendingly brilliant novel. M.R. Carey, author of The Girl with All the Gifts, says the book is pitch-perfect cosmic horror,

and the pitch will break all the glass in your brain. Get your copy of There is No Antimimetics Division Now, wherever books and audiobooks are sold. and try to remember this message. So far, the hides that we've been talking about are mostly dangerous to themselves. As we move down the sliding scale, we get to the hides that are dangerous to others. But these hides are anti-heroes

because their enemies are real villains, villains like Loki and the Avengers. Enough! You are all of you beneath me. I am a god, you dull creature. and I will not be bullied by... Puny God. I'm going to talk more about the Hulk

when we get to the Jekylls because I have a lot to say about Bruce Banner. So let's move on for now to Breaking Bad. And I think Breaking Bad is actually kind of a subtler version of the same dichotomy. In the show, a high school teacher named Walter White

is diagnosed with terminal cancer. To secure his family's financial future, he starts making and selling drugs. He creates a criminal persona called Heisenberg and discovers there is a master criminal inside of him waiting to be unleashed. I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot and you think that of me. No, I am the one who knocks. The origin of Deccl and Hyde kind of echoes the show Breaking Bad, because both of the Before Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde,

he co-wrote a play about a man named William Brody. The play was based on a true story. Brody had a very respectable position in society, but he lived a double life as a burglar and gambler. Stevenson was fascinated, what motivated Brody's behavior, and how he was able to compartmentalize these different sides of himself. Tying that into Breaking Bad,

there's a key moment in the series, when Walter White's cancer goes into remission. He doesn't need to be Heisenberg anymore. He simply wants to. You need to understand. I have to hear one more time that you did this for the family. I did it for me. And that brings me to the far end of the spectrum.

The hides were violent, not out of circumstances, not because somebody's antagonizing them, they commit horrific crimes for the pleasure of it. Two years after Jekyllyn Hyde was published, Jack the Ripper began his killing spree. The book had been so successful, there was an actor named Richard Mansfield playing Jekylln Hyde on stage in London,

Professor Jamil Mustafa says. People began to speculate, and they thought, well, he's so good at performing this double life being Jekyllen Hyde. Maybe he's actually living, this out, right? Could he possibly be Jack the Ripper? And this is one of these ridiculous theories. But even

I think it was the New York Times drew this connection between not maybe Mansfield necessarily, but the Jekyll and Hyde story and the story of Jack the Ripper. And they refer to Jack the Ripper as a Jekyll Hyde character. So I think it's natural that afterward

we would associate serial killers with Jekyll and Hyde. All the hides I've talked about so far are characters that represent aspects of ourselves or people we might know. But when it comes to the serial killer hides, these are characters that hopefully we cannot relate to on any level. In fact, these stories are often trying to make sense of how a human being could do something monstrous. In the original book, Jekyll really grappled with that as well. It isn't as though Jekyll is pure good and Hyde is pure evil. Hide is pure evil, according to Jekyll,

But Jekyll is a composite of good and evil. And he accepts that evil is a part of humanity. He doesn't try to destroy it, interestingly. That's not what he's about. He's about releasing it, separating it out. Which, of course, raises the question, well, what do you think evil is going to do when it's out and about, right? But Jekyll just wants to separate them, not to destroy the evil.

Some of the modern variations of the truly heinous hides are also trying to separate good from evil, as if they're not really part of the same person. In the movie Psycho from 1960, the Hyde character is Norman Bates' mother. But this is a version of his mother that exists in his mind. His real mother is dead, and he dresses up as her when he commits murder.

In the last scene, Norman is caught, he's sitting in jail, and we hear his mother's voice in his head. His facial expressions imply that she has taken full possession of his body, even if she blames Norman for their crimes. He was always bad, and in the end he intended to tell them I killed those girls and that man, as if I could do anything except just sit and stare, like one of his stuffed birds. They know I can't even move a finger, and I won't. I'll just sit here and be quiet.

There's a similar dichotomy in Twin Peaks. The Hyde character is a supernatural entity named Bob, who embeds himself into Leland Palmer. When Leland is in his normal default state, he's like a kindly sitcom dad. It's implied that Bob is pushing Leland to commit horrific crimes, like murdering his daughter, Laura Palmer. After he's caught and put in jail, Bob speaks to eight. Agent Cooper from the FBI through Leland's body. Oh, Leland, Leland, Leland, you've been a good vehicle, and I've enjoyed the ride. But now he's weak and full of holes.

It's almost nearly time to shuffle off the buffalo. Does Leland know what you've done? Leland's a babe in the woods with a large hole where his conscience used to be. Jamil pointed out that Laura Palmer was also grappling with duality on a smaller scale. She seems to be kind of a perfect young woman by day and then, you know, cheating on her boyfriend and getting into prostitution by night. And so she herself is, I think, a Jekyll and Hyde figure. He says the same thing is happening in Psycho. Janet Lee plays Marion Crane, who is famously stabbed in The Shepard.

at the Bates Motel. The movie begins with her stealing money from work and going on the run. And it's a surprisingly small shift from a loyal employee to a criminal. She's not possessed. She just makes a decision. She lets her hide out for a minute. And then she faces the consequences. And in this case, it's a death sentence for her.

In Twin Peaks and Psycho, the hide character could be seen as a figure of cruel justice. What's even more frightening is that they're hiding in plain sight. There's a super creepy scene when Norman is talking with Marion at the Bates Hotel, and her body language goes back and forth between feeling compassion for this guy and being slightly afraid of him. You know what I think? I think that we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other. And for all of it, we never budge an inch. Sometimes we deliberately step into those traps.

I was born in mine. I don't mind it anymore. Oh, but you should. You should mind it. Oh, I do, but I say I don't. So that is our sliding scale of hides. The sliding scale of Jekylls is about how they deal with their hides. At one end of the spectrum are the Jekylls who are in denial.

Norman Bates is delusional. He acts like his mother's alive, and each side of his personality blames the other for committing murder. Then we have the Jekylls that are aware of their hides but feel helpless. Like on Twin Peaks, Leland Palmer felt like he was a prisoner of Bob, and he was too weak to stop him. Moving up the scale, we have the Jekylls who fight against their hides and want to get rid of them.

And that brings me to Bruce Banner. For a long time, Banner felt like a captive to the Hulk. In the 1970s TV show starring Bill Bixby, the character was looking for a way to cure himself, get rid of the Hulk. And he always warned people. Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. For a long time in the country,

comics, the TV show, and the first two Hulk movies. The character was portrayed as being tragically doomed. But in the first Avengers movie from 2012, the other characters are surprised to discover that Bruce Banner has begun to have some control over the Hulk. For the most part, he can transform when he needs to, and he can guide the Hulk towards goals like fighting an alien invasion. Now might be a really good time for you to get angry. That's my secret cat. I'm always angry. Jamil Mustafa says,

despite all the excellent highbrow movies and shows that we've discussed, Bruce Banner's arc in the MCU is one of his favorite variations of Jekyllen Hyde. That in some ways is a kind of improvement on the Jekyllyn Hyde story, one might argue, because, of course, at the end, Jekyllyn Hyde, you know, destroy each other. They can't coexist. But I think Bruce Banner and the Hulk tend to, after a while, it takes a long time, you know, but I think eventually they kind of learn to live with each other and accept each other. For years, I've been treating the Hulk like he's some kind of disease, something to get rid of.

But then I start looking at him as the cure, 18 months in the Gamma Lab. I put the brains and the brawn together, and now look at me. Best of both worlds. Excuse me, Mr. Holt? Yes. Can we get a photo? 100% little person. Come on, step on up.

Do you mind? These stories are all metaphors to talk about human psychology. So to get another perspective, I went to see a shrink. Sort of. Yanni Tenbrook teaches psychology at Turro University in New York. She's been on the podcast before. She says one thing that interests her about the novel is that there's something about it which is very dated. The book was written in the Victorian era, where, as she puts it, the underlying message was,

Men, but for the confines of social rules, are beasts. And therefore, they have to follow these kind of strict social codes and things like that. But of course, if people are following these strict social codes, they're not actually allowed to be human. In the last 140 years, social codes have changed a lot. So she thinks the modern variations of Jekyll and Hyde work better as metaphors for addiction. Because the hidden behavior is actually something that's bad and is actually something that can be really, really harmful as opposed to sexuality, which is just different. But, you know, Hyde was a character that Jekyll felt compelled to inhabit. So he developed Hyde because he wanted to indulge, you know, his, his, his,

naughty side, but he wanted to keep up his public persona as this good guy. And so he created the Hyde character or he created the ability to sort of induce the Hyde character at will. That actually aligns really, really well with addiction. And, you know, he tried to go clean. He tried to stop, you know, pulling out Hyde and everything. But he ultimately couldn't, you know, one of the things that happens when people get addicted to things is that even if they stop, their brain has changed. their brain will always remember what it felt like. And things will never feel as good as it did maybe when they were first, you know, experimenting with the drug or everything like that.

They won't feel as good as that, but they will always chase that. So Jekyll went clean for a while, but then he got back with, you know, hide, he induced hide again, and it was worse than ever. And also, because when it comes to things that actually really change people's behaviors, things like alcohol are really disinhibiting. And what we're talking about when we're talking about people, you know, in Fight Club or Black Swan are people who are being disinhibited or they're being their disinhibited self, which in some ways is their best self, but is also lacks the humanity to control their behavior. That disinhibition can allow for something that they call myopia or alcohol-related myopia where people are focusing on the things that they want. their brain is not entertaining possible bad outcomes, but also that makes them more open to violence.

I said to Yanni, it seems like this push and pull between Jekyll and Hyde is similar to the concept of the id, the ego, and the super ego. But that's very Freudian. I wasn't sure if those terms were even used in psychology today. It's not outdated when you apply to art or literature and things like that. It is pretty outdated if you were to, you know, apply it in a therapeutic sense. But because it's just metaphorical. They're not actually places in our brain. They're not actually definable sources of personality or things like that.

But they are a really great description of who we are. And, you know, the ideal of who we want to be, which is our super ego, which is the internalization of all the rules that we've gotten in the world. You have to be this way. You have to be that way. So if you're looking at Black Swan, you know, the mom. who is telling her, you know, don't eat this, don't eat that, you have to practice, and all of those things. That's kind of the super ego. The id, it's, it's really unfair to call the id something evil

or something bad. The id is just an infant. I mean, in a Freudian terms, it's, it's just an infant, and it's, it has no ability to control, you know, its need for instant gratification, its impulses, it just acts on everything that sort of crosses its mind. And so the id isn't necessarily good or bad. It is just raw and primal. That's the id. And the ego is the self. You know, the ego has to mediate between the demands of the super ego of perfection and things like that. And the just the raw desires that the id puts out there. You know, there's a carrot and stick thing that happens that I think is really interesting, which is that there are sort of internal mechanisms to reward us for good behavior like the super ego rewards us with pride. So if we do things where

We're following the rules and we do things correctly in society. We get this sense of pride, which is a reward. But the sense of kind of reward for the id is just satisfaction. You know, you have a need and it's met. That's why she thinks a lot of modern variations of Jekyll and Hyde lean into psychology. If modern day Jekylls are getting mixed messages on how to behave, those crosswires are probably in their own minds. So when we see their hide come out...

you know, it's liberating for us because we get to, we get to, you know, imagine ourselves as those characters and things like that. And it's what would I do if I wasn't afraid? What would I do if I wasn't afraid of being arrested? What would I do if I wasn't afraid of actually hurting someone? What I think is interesting about the Hulk, as opposed to some of these other characters like the Black Swan, is that the Hulk seems to embody this sense of righteousness or this sense of good and bad and does things in the name of good, but things that are destructive. You know, Bruce Banner would do these things if he wasn't sort of, you know, kind of a mousy guy. So, you know, for him, it's a very clear situation in which, you know, you have this sort of

good drive and things like that, but then you strip away the inhibiting forces that we have that just kick in when we think about doing anything to get even or to enact justice or things like that. We have a part of our brain that instantly inhibits our aggressive urges, you know, to varying degrees. You know, when you talk about violent criminals, they typically have an ineffective system for inhibiting their urges and things like that. So, you know, it's not for him. It seems to me that it's less like an alter ego, something completely different within himself, but it seems to me that it's him wanting to do right, but it takes away, you know, all the aspects of humanity that would sort of limit him in that capacity.

I asked Yanni, is this metaphor psychologically unhealthy? Are we using this idea of a hide to create a barrier between who we think we are and aspects of ourselves that we don't like or don't want to acknowledge? Is it a way to avoid taking responsibility for our actions in saying, oh, that actually wasn't me, that was my hide? Yanni says, yeah, kind of all the above. People can't distance themselves from the parts of themselves that they don't like. You know, while humans absolutely do exist in a world where there's a lot of duality,

where people have a lot of different extremes or how they would behave in certain situations, which are completely different than how they would behave in other situations. But duality isn't necessarily dichotomy. It's not necessarily one thing or the other. Duality is not the same thing. thing is dichotomy. When Yanni said that, I realized I've been using those words interchangeably,

but they don't mean the same thing. If another character besides Jekyll drank his formula, that person would transform but not into Hyde. In the Marvel universe, when other characters besides Banner are exposed to gamma rays,

they do transform, but not into the Hulk. The Hulk is Banner. Hyde is Jekyll. You know, everything's on a continuum and you put any human in any kind of extreme situation and that they haven't been in before and you'll see them behaving in a way that maybe nobody would imagine that they would have behaved,

that they themselves wouldn't have imagined that they would behave that way. Jamil Mustafa says that's why the novel has become a classic. Other gothic fictions and horror fiction, they sometimes tend to focus on the threat from without. right? So think about, you know, the haunted house or the castle with the, with the villain in it and the dungeon and so forth, right? Jekylline Hyde is not about that. It's about the war within. So the anxiety has to do with the unknown as it does with, you know, Gothic generally. But in this case, what's unknown is not external. It's internal. I think that's very significant, right?

we don't understand isn't the world without. It's the world within. And Emily Dickinson, who is, you know, she sees very clearly so many different things. She has this wonderful poem called One Need Not Be a Chamber to be haunted. One of the lines goes, far safer of a midnight meeting external ghost than an interior confronting, that cooler host. Far safer through an Abby Gallop, the stones a chase, then unarmed one's own self-encounter in lonesome place. Ourself behind our self-concealed should startle most. Assassin hid in our apartment be horrors least. So she gets this, right?

She gets that what's inside us is really scary. As I was talking with Jamil and Yanni, I thought this is very interesting in terms of humanity as a whole. but I wasn't thinking about how it applied to myself. And then I remembered when I lived in Los Angeles, I hated the traffic jams so much that a side of me came out which was unrecognizable to me. I felt convinced that the other drivers were in a citywide conspiracy to stop me from getting where I was going.

I would scream at them from inside my car and I would drive aggressively around them. When I was in that state of mind, my anger felt so righteous, even though the logic of my anger made no sense. My brother used to call that side of me Rage Man. And I haven't seen Raged Man in a long time to the point where I actually forgot about him. It's weird to think that Rage Man is still in there. So if you see me on the highway, don't cut me off.

You wouldn't like me when I'm cut off. I don't like that side of me either. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Jamil Mustafa and Yanni Tembrook. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. I talked a lot more with Jamil and he had so many interesting things to say about the origin of Jekylland Hyde. I put the full interview on the show's Patreon page.

Now, anyone who pledges $5 a month or more on Patreon gets access to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. But that can be a little overwhelming to navigate. So I created a curated collection on Patreon that features about two dozen of my favorite full-length interviews from the Dropbox account. And I organized these interviews into folders labeled film and TV, literature, comics, and games.

In those folders, you'll find the interview that I did with the novelists who wrote The Expans, my conversation with Stanley Kubrick, Brick's daughter, Catherine. My interview with Mark Rosewater about Magic the Gathering, and my interview with Mad Magazine legend Al Jaffey. Patreon subscribers also have access to Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show. It's only available on Patreon. In the most recent episode of Between Imaginary Worlds, I talked with Aaron Tracy about his podcast, The Secret World of Roll Doll. Dahl is famous for his children's books, also famous for

for being problematic. I talked with Aaron Tracy about how we should approach Doll's work today. There is a lot of nastiness in all of those books, and I think a lot of that comes from the fact that the creator, that Doll was a bit of a nasty guy to a lot of people in his life. It doesn't stop me from reading it. In fact, I think it's a virtue of it. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show

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