This has been a very good month for ARCs from Subterranean Press for me, as I’ve had one superb urban fantasy novella from them and now a Robert Bloch-penned collection of Jack the Ripper fiction has shown up!
I’m very fond of how Jack the Ripper shows up in fiction. Simon R. Green has Mister Stab, an immortal Jack Ripper, in his Secret Histories series, Babylon 5 used Mister Sebastian, who was the historical Ripper spirited away by the Vorlons and used as an interrogator by them, whereas From Hell is a graphic novel by writer Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell that explored the identity and motives of Jack the Ripper, and the recent Whitechapel series aired on the BBC explored the links between those murders and a copy-cat killer in present day London.
Now we have all of Bloch’s Jack the Ripper stories, including ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper’ which was published in Weird Tales in 1943 when Bloch was still establishing himself as a writer, though he had been responsible for nearly forty episodes of a radio horror show called Stay Tuned for Terror.
He continued to revisit the Jack the Ripper theme over and over so it obviously fascinated him.
His next use of the Ripper was as an immortal in Bloch’s contribution to the original Star Trek series episode Wolf in the Fold, an episode that remains one of the best of the original series. The entire script is included here and it’s an amazing feat indeed. You can get the actual episode (restored) from iTunes and I did indeed rewatch it after reading the script.
‘A Most Unusual Murder’ has a man buying a battered medical kit for a staggering £100 from a London antique dealer who seems strangely very reluctant to part with it. The bag once belonged to ‘J. Ridley, MD’ who, Kane explains to his friend Woods, was better known as Jack the Ripper. The old proprietor comes looking to retrieve the bag as it’s a prize exhibit in his personal Black Museum. He’s not what at all he seems, of course ….
(Bloch notably penned three original scripts for the original series with the other two being ‘What Are Little Girls Made Of?’ and ‘Catspaw’.)
His contribution to Harlan Ellison’s 1967 science fiction anthology, Dangerous Visions, was the story called ‘A Toy for Juliette’ which evoked both the Marquis de Sade and Jack the Ripper in a time-travel story.
The complete 1984 novel Night of the Ripper is here. It is set during the reign of Queen Victoria and follows the investigation of Inspector Frederick Abberline in attempting to apprehend the Ripper. It includes some famous Victorians such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle within the storyline.
The Subterranean Press collection finishes off with ‘Two Victorian Gentlemen’ which is a nice coda to a volume. The foreword is by Bloch, from his Ripper! volume.
All in all this is a very impressive volume that both fans of dark fantasy and fans of The Jack the Ripper story will want to purchase. You can pre-order it here.
(Subterranean Press, 2011)
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