The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 11: His Red, Wrong Life

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In 2009, how do you begin writing about Jack the Ripper? What can you say about him, at least in preface, that will add any insight to the man who, in the public mind, invented serial murder? Who, having never been caught, exists as both a historical figure and as a source of mythical horror (so he's like Dracula in that sense, I suppose)? You'd do as well to write about Santa Claus, for all you can add to the conversation. Oh, you could make a fool of yourself, I suppose, by concocting a new, poorly researched and barely thought-out theory as to identity, but even then you'll have your work cut out for you if you hope to reach the level of absurdity achieved by Richard Wallace, whose candidate for Jack the Ripper's true identity is Lewis Carroll (by the way, if you don't feel like picking up Jack the Ripper: Light-Hearted Friend, Wallace's book on the subject -- which I recommend you do, for the entertainment value -- then at least click on that link. It's amusing stuff).
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Fortunately for me, I'm not here to write about the Ripper murders as a piece of history, or as a symbol of certain cultural trends, both in 1888 and now, but rather as the subject of fiction. Which is, of course, difficult enough to do, as the list of novels, comics, films, poems and short stories is virtually endless: cheap thrillers by the handful; Hollywood B movies (or B+, in some cases) like Time After Time and Murder by Decree; Hitchcock's The Lodger (or John Brahm's The Lodger, or Marie Belloc-Lowndes's The Lodger); blasphemous, though still good, Sherlock Holmes pastiches like Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story; high literary novels like Lawrence Durrell's Quinx, or The Ripper's Tale, Paul West's The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, Ian Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Pat Barker's Blow Your House Down; and the grandaddy of them all, from where I sit, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's epic, and epically complex, comic book, From Hell...I think you know as well as I do that I've barely scratched the surface. So for my purposes today, the question has much less to do with how I am going to write about this subject, but how do writers still find a scrap of meat to pick off the Ripper's bones, and turn it into a meal?

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Apparently, they don't. Or rather, they don't necessarily concern themselves with the fact that the road they've chosen has already been well travelled, because, by pure coincidence, both stories I chose to read today -- chosen essentially at random -- deal with a Jack the Ripper who has survived into old age. I think it's probably safe to assume that, in reality, the murders stopped because the Ripper died (though who knows), but the legend is so powerful, so unhappily rich (and richly unhappy) that almost nothing is too much, or too ridiculous. The Ripper is a ghost to us now, and ghosts can do and be anything. The entire reason for this is because he was never caught, and unsolved murders refuse to be shaken from our collective conscious. Even attempts to downplay the dark mystery by focusing on the day-to-day, historical reality can't snap things into focus: James Vanderbilt and Brad Fischer, the screenwriter and producer for David Fincher's Zodiac -- and I bow to no one in my love for that film -- have both said that one of the aims of that film is to demystify the Zodiac Murders, but I believe it's a rare individual who leaves that film and doesn't have the strange facts and numerous unknowns of that case buzzing and scratching around in their brains.

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So...Jack the Ripper as an old man. The first story I read is by Charles L. Grant. It's a little nine-page affair called "My Shadow is the Fog", and it's a low-key, mysterious little story whose true nature isn't revealed until the end. The truth is, it would be easy to be entirely unaware that this is a Jack the Ripper story until the ending, if I hadn't found it in an anthology, edited by Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper, called Ripper! For most of its length, it appears to simply be a somewhat off-kilter story about an old man wandering along a beach, who finds himself bothered by a young girl. At first he humors her, but he grows increasingly frustrated by her presence, and her strange questions, and her unnerving familiarity, a familiarity whose source he cannot place.

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I will admit that, had I found this story in a less thematically specific anthology of horror stories, the fact that it's revealed that the girl won't stop talking about a strange man named Jack, who is "a cleaner", and further that the old man's name is Jack Light ("light" being an old euphemism for lungs), I might have been tipped off that "Jack" wasn't a randomly chosen name. But still, for the most part Grant's story is quiet, moody, and keeps its cards close. The final truth of what all of this means in relation to Jack the Ripper is maybe a little bit old-news, but it's handled quite well -- Grant gets the chill he's after, as well as a haunting, lingering quality that most stories that aim for a similar kind of stinger ending could never manage.

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The other story I read is by Lucius Shepard, and it has the wonderful title, "Jack's Decline". In Shepard's version of events, the Ripper -- whose identity Shepard doesn't bother to provide, because he knows it's irrelevant -- had been caught, or rather identified, by his own family, and privately put away in an upper-class mental institution. At the turn of the 20th century...

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...there was a reawakening of interest in the murders, new clues and rumors that struck close to the bone, and his family -- none of whom he had seen since the beginning of his confinement -- gave orders that he be moved from England, fearing that their awful secret would be brought to light. He was issued a German passport under the name of Gerhard Steigler, and one night in the autumn of that year, along with his warders, his doctor of the moment, and a trunkful of the drugs that kept his demon tame, he crossed the English Channel to Calais, and there entrained for Krakow in Poland.

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Shepard's Ripper is a man who fully believes that his bloodlust is not entirely his own doing, but more the fault of a demon who has possessed him. In 1915, a new doctor is sent to the Ripper's home at a hunting lodge in the hills of Poland. This doctor attempts psychoanalysis on the Ripper, and manages to dredge up a series of childhood traumas that the doctor believes is at least a clue to his patient's mental aberrations, but the Ripper is having none of it:
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"You claim, Doctor...that once I accept the connection between my childhood pain and the murders, a cure will be forthcoming. But those experiences only weakened me, made me susceptible to the demon and allowed him to enter and take possession of my body. There were supernatural forces in play. Witness the arrangements I made of the viscera...like some sort of cabalistic sign."

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Those visceral arrangements are, of course, another source of the eternal power of the Ripper's fact and legend, because they've never been explained, or decoded. Alan Moore exploited this aspect with great success in From Hell, but Shepard's Ripper doesn't even know why he did it himself. Something forced his hand to drape the organs just so, and he's at as a great a loss to explain the meanings of those bloody designs as anyone. But if he doesn't know, surely someone must.

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Perhaps you've noticed that Shepard has placed the Ripper in Poland during the early part of the 20th century. And perhaps you've come to a conclusion regarding where this is all leading. Perhaps you think that's a bad idea. Well, you're right about some of that. There are Nazis in this story. It's such an obvious ploy, bringing the greatest symbol of pre-20th century horror together with the greatest evil of the modern world, and see what shakes out. When I clued into where Shepard was taking this, I began to despair. But the truth is that, while a small group of Nazis, and their abuse of Jewish captives, does feature prominently in this story's second half, it's also strangely irrelevant. At least, these Nazis are irrelevant as Nazis, but they are relevant as their own representation of a different, modern kind of evil. At one point, a Nazi officer and the Ripper (who everyone knows as a harmless old man named Herr Steigler, of course) have a brief conversation about the definition of evil. The officer believes that evil "is a judgment made by history", and idea that the Ripper dismisses this idea. The officer goes on to insist that while war "may call for a repression of one's conscience at times", he hardly believes this counts as true evil. The Ripper takes note of the officer's uniform and responds:
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"Black cloth and patent leather and silver arcana. These are not the lineaments of a good soldier, Captain. They are designed to inspire dread. But apart from being psychological weapons, they are ritual expressions. Invocations of evil...Your invocations may prove effective and allow evil to possess you. Should that occur, you will have no joy in it..."

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Later, the Ripper and the officer have cause to speak again (and the Ripper will face his demon) under much different circumstances. When the officer refers to the Ripper as "Herr Steigler", the Ripper's response sums things up quite nicely:

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"I am not Herr Steigler," said Red Jack. "I am mystery."

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 9: Tell Me Why You're Running

Time for a quick post or two, so that I don't burn out too quickly. Today, I read a couple of fairly short stories taken from volume six of editor and writer Charles L. Grant's series of anthologies from the 70s and 80s called Shadows. This was in important, long-running series that gave a lot of new writers wide exposure during the era's horror boom, helping some of them to not be completely steam-rolled by Stephen King.

The first writer I chose was Al Sarrantonio, whose massive, in size and importance, anthology 999 I wrote about last year, in relation to William Peter Blatty's novella Elsewhere. Though he's made quite a stamp as an editor (he also put out big anthologies of fantasy and science fiction stories, called Flights and Redshift respectively, shortly after 999), he's also quite a prolific writer, and in the introduction to his collection of stories called Toybox, Joe R. Lansdale says:

...Al, though a solid novelist, is to my mind, at heart, a short story writer. Sure, his books are entertaining, but there's a unique magic, a special attitude, a personal stylistic attack, that belongs to his short fiction...

How interesting! Anyway, the story I picked from Shadows 6 (and also found in Toybox) is called "The Man With Legs", and it's about two kids, Willie and his older sister Nellie. When the story opens, Nellie is insisting she saw "him", and Willie is saying that he doesn't buy it, teasing her that she was dreaming. Who "he" is we don't know until about halfway through the story, after Nellie and Willie take a bus to the part of town where she saw "the house". So the story is very cagey at first, you see, but eventually we find out that "he" is their father, who they believed dead, killed in a train accident that caused both of their father's legs to be severed. But the man they meet convinces even Willie that he is their father, even though this man is alive. He has legs, too, but he moves around very stiffly.

While waiting for their father to make them hot chocolate, Willie wanders off to use the bathroom. He stumbles, of course, across the basement, where he finds...

...hundreds, many thousands of pairs of legs. In all lengths and sizes they were squatty and wrist-thin and beefy and babylike. Each was dressed appropriately, in pants or stockings, socks and shoes, ballerina slippers, bedroom slippers...

Etc. You get the idea, I think. Where we're heading with all this is quite bizarre, and doesn't really work. The basic premise behind "The Man With Legs" is a good one (and, in context, I like the title, too), but I feel like Sarrantonio, when faced with finding some way to pay this thing off, thought, "Well now what the fuck do I do?" And he wrapped it up quick in the only way that would, or at least might, immediately satisfy the reader. But it all seems pretty arbitrary, and even a bit of a waste of a nice set-up.

The second story I read is called "But at My Back I Always Hear" by David Morrell, also known as "The Guy Who Invented Rambo". The John Rambo we all know and love was created by Morrell for his original novel called First Blood, and, in fact, Morrell really is better known as a thriller writer. His occasional forays into horror are largely in the short story form, with the occasional horror novel like The Totem, or a genre hybrid like Creepers thrown in for good measure.

I'd read a handful of his short horror fiction before getting to "But at My Back I Always Hear", and frankly all of them are better than this one. Again, like "The Man With Legs", it starts off well enough. The narrator, Charles Ingram, informs us out of the gate that he is writing this story from a motel room, into which he checked under an assumed name. He did so because he's afraid that "she" will find him. "She" is Samantha Perry, one of the students in his creative writing course back home. He barely even knew she was in his class until he showed up to his office one morning and found her waiting for him. She's a plain girl (much is made of this, strangely) and very upset because she believes that Ingram has been communicating to her through code and, eventually, telepathy, imploring her to sleep with him. He assures her that this isn't the case, but she won't buy it, and takes to calling him at three in the morning. Spooked, Ingram and his wife try to get help from the police, from her psychiatrist, and so on, with no progress. Then, her psychiatrist tells him that Samantha has killed herself. But the calls keep coming.

This story is just too by the numbers, and the writing doesn't elevate it. Before Samantha even turns into a ghost, Ingram starts screaming every time the phone rings. She's not even directly threatening him! I can understand getting good and spooked under these circumstances, but Morrell says he actually shrieks. There's a lot of that sort of thing in the story: take a basic supsense situation and try to increase the tension by making your characters overreact. Now, once he knows she's a ghost, I can hardly blame the shrieking, but by that time Morrell had already lost me.

Choosing stories for this project is always kind of a crapshoot. I might be in the mood to really write about something good, and find myself stuck with something that leaves me utterly cold. I'll be straight with you and say that it's not unheard of for the reverse to be true, as well, but tonight I just wanted a couple of sharp little stories to remind me of the core reasons why I love this genre. Unfortunately, both stories are rather dismissable. Though I don't mind the break, this post really is as short as it is out of necessity.