Author Kevin Morris Returns Jack the Ripper to His Origins in “The Ripper Lives”
By Gerard Edmund Snook
IN THE TIMESPACE SINCE JACK THE RIPPER FIRST STRUCK FEAR INTO THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF VICTORIAN LONDON, the killer has been scrutinized from every angle, greatly diminishing his fear factor. “Naming the Ripper and uncovering his secrets,” says Kevin Morris, “has destroyed the mystery and rendered his ominousity impotent”—attributes that the writer restores in the historical horror book series, “The Ripper Lives”. Morris gives us all the details of how the panic and intrigue that once surrounded the enigmatic figure was rekindled.
“I looked back into the mist, toward the unknown, and in my heart, I knew the worst awaited me. It was another body. Another victim. Another failure for justice. It had to be. I set off to face it. And the fog closed in around me.”
Ripper of Nightmares
The allure of Jack the Ripper of legend lies in his ability to raise hairs, accelerate pulses, and compel morbid curiosity about his identity, crimes, and motives. “In the beginning,” says the author, “the Ripper was a ghost in the fog, whose proof of life was the bodies left in his wake. His image was conjured from the dark recesses of the mind and shaped by trauma, which made him far more terrifying than any man of flesh and blood.” This mystery surrounding the killer is used to a chilling effect in the unnerving suspense horror narrative, heightening the terror that readers experience.
“Contemplation filled the air as a chill rolled through the room. Silence descended as the four of us turned to study the board as one. It’s overlapping pages, threadbare twine, and handwritten scrawl, overloaded with information, inundating with questions, each more pressing than the last. Were we looking for a lone killer? If so, had our eyewitnesses glimpsed him in the night? When and where would he strike next? And why? And, grimmest of all, after Kelly, what would it look like?”
Deep Into Darkness
As a secret task force follows the trail of the Ripper, the reader is pulled into the blackness, feet first. The East End of the series is a purgatory on Earth, as it was in life—a dark, dreary place infected with hopelessness and misery. Decay is everywhere. Pollution camouflages every kind of rot, from disease to addiction to disorders of the mind. The buildings and streets are stained with soot from the factories, and the District is cloaked in smog, intensifying the sense of despair.
“It was the vilest sight if I had ever seen one. Three featureless doorways adorned either side of the corridor, open paths to sleeping rooms that reeked of filth and the sweat of disease. The floor palpitated with a living carpet of cockroaches atop the waterlogged boards. Rats, too, made their homes there, some as large as cats. I hung back as I watched them claw at the walls from within and, scrabbling for crumbs, seek food through pockets or trouser legs. The walls were a patchwork of sickly-coloured stains, warped and flecked with a foul black mould. This all in the company of those still breathing, shivering, dying in the same hall, for the cost of two shillings a week. Seven or eight resided on the landing alone.”
Trapped in these nightmarish conditions, Whitechapel is a hotbed of tension and paranoia where weary residents are haunted by the shadow of death lurking in alleys and tormented by visions of a horrible end. A sudden movement seen out of the corner of an eye, a slight uplift in the fog, or a trick of the barest sliver of light can trigger crippling anxiety. No one is safe when the Ripper could be around any corner.
“My paranoia festered for two nights. By the third, I heard scuffed shoes behind me across the cobbles, hairs prickling on my neck at the slightest sound. Ordinarily, I would have sworn I was being followed, though the feeling continued even to the base deep under the Yard, where my faith trumped my fear, and I could be sure I was safe. I was waking at odd times, hearing strange noises from every which way, padding footsteps back and forth across the landing until I either burned through a hole or flopped back into bed.”
The Parade of Horrors
Of course, the trepidation is sometimes warranted. Homicides are common in the 19th-century Metropolis, most often by stabbing or strangulation. Sometimes, the victim suffers a more gruesome demise, as one particularly ghastly tale illustrates.
“A Polish immigrant, he’d barely entered his twenties when, in the previous year, he’d murdered a pregnant Miriam Angel by forcing her to ingest nitric acid. Her shrieks had shrivelled as her oesophagus collapsed, followed by the corrosion of her stomach and the slow, seething death of both her and her unborn. The burns to her mouth and face from the struggle had blistered her skin a pustulous red with deep patches of black where the muscle beneath had burned to a crust. Her hands were outstretched, coiled tight around phantom limbs, her eyes tensed open, even in death, yearning for an ounce of relief to the very end.”
Despite the daily parade of horrors, nothing prepares Whitechapel for the Ripper, whose crimes exceed even the darkest imagination. Each subsequent attack is more brutal than the last to achieve some unknown purpose. Graphic descriptions of the unthinkable carnage bring the Ripper’s unchained ferocity to life.
“A pair of legs were jutting from the doorway, carved up from top to toe. They belonged to a dead woman in her forties lying face down in the corridor which was leading inside the property. Her wounds were deep and rugged, some singular stabs, others running the entire length of the thigh to expose slick yellowed fat beneath. Facing out to the street, the genitalia had been reduced to what I can only describe as a gouged hole, gored, widened, and scooped free of inner flesh by countless thrusts of a blade. The rim of it was crimson red and crawling with flies. The sharp smell of blood burned in the nasal passages while the eyes were assaulted by untold mucks and juices that dripped down the walls, splashback from the vicious attack that had left the flesh icy cold.”
Reasons Beyond Reason
The butcher’s m.o. is without precedent—vicious and merciless. Jack the Ripper doesn’t just kill; he decimates, and no one is entirely certain why. “The public, starving from a famine of facts,” says Morris, “fills the void with tabloid drivel and wild speculation. Law enforcement, meanwhile, without the insights of modern criminal profiling, relies on theories and, sometimes, supposition.”
“I returned to 13 Miller’s Court again. The scene compounded upon me like a dream within a dream, the scent of metal on my fingertips, the flesh torn like paper. As a child growing up in Dorset, I knew of a lonely boy who would take apart hedgehogs and voles to see how they worked. He dissected with a stick and a dinner knife, the gruesome deconstructions abandoned to the night and found strewn about the town by scavengers come morning. I was reminded of that explanation as I stood there, examining the crusted blood coating the sheets, the burned clothes in the fireplace …”
Jack The Ripper Revealed
The many unanswered questions about the Ripper are leveraged in the narrative to restore his mystery. But even though the unknown is the key to his power over minds, the author admits that he must ultimately be unmasked. “There comes the point,” says Morris, “when the butcher’s secrets must be revealed, and,” he promises, “that will come.” Until then, readers will just have to keep their doors locked and lights on.
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About The Ripper Lives (10 book series):
JACK THE RIPPER’S REIGN OF TERROR CONTINUES
The world’s most elusive and terrifying serial killer returns in a new 10-part horror book series, The Ripper Lives. Dripping with Victorian-era atmosphere and intrigue, each thrilling, suspense-filled chapter ends with a shocking cliffhanger that compels the reader forward. The fear builds as the murder mystery unfolds, culminating in an explosive, mind-bending conclusion.
The Ripper Lives is a sequel to the true story that commences after the slayings of the Canonical Five. As a secretly appointed task force works to bring the butcher to justice under the radar of the newspapers, the unsuspecting public believes the threat has subsided. But while hiding in the shadows, the serial killer’s compulsion to mutilate has grown exponentially stronger, and for Whitechapel, the harrowing nightmare of tension and terror has only just begun.
The Ripper Lives is available exclusively on Amazon and is free on Kindle Unlimited.