The Dynamiter

What an odd, wonderful book this is. Sometimes confusing but always absorbing, The Dynamiter (written by Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson) is neither a novel nor a collection of short stories, but rather a group of tales woven together with a very slender thread. The setting is London in the 1880's. Three bored, aimless, rather useless young men make an agreement among themselves that they will each take up the very next adventure that comes along. They go their separate ways and encounter various individuals who tell them fantastic tales - of vengeful Mormons in Utah ("Story of the Destroying Angel"), of voodoo terror in Cuba ("Story of the Fair Cuban"), of bomb-wielding anarchists in London ("Tale of the Explosive Bomb"), of an abandoned mansion where all sorts of mysterious people show up ("The Superfluous Mansion").