I remember liking it, but I read it when I was 13 or so. Jekyll and Hyde and Treasure Island are certainly more famous, and Weir of Hermiston, though unfinished, is quite often presented as his stylistic masterpiece.

I take it you won't be picking up Catriona, then? (The sequel to Kidnapped)

And yes, Stevenson died young. But strangely not from tuberculosis or another disease of the lungs, which is what everyone expected to kill him (and which made him move to Samoa, where he died, in the first place).