Alone with the Horrors
Winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award for collection: the canonical one-volume Campbell and a standard text in any serious horror education.
Book Entry · Horror
What is Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper about?
A short story with a long shadow: Sir Guy Hollis of the British Embassy arrives in wartime Chicago with a theory — the Ripper never died, his murders being ritual sacrifices that purchase eternal youth, and the trail of unsolved slayings has crossed the Atlantic. He recruits a sceptical psychiatrist for a tour of the city's bohemian undergrounds, hunting a man who could look like anyone, which is of course the trap: the final line is one of the genre's most cleanly sprung. Bloch's Ripper obsession (he returned to it across his career, including a Star Trek script) effectively founded the Ripper-as-occult-immortal industry.
Why it matters
The story that made the Ripper a permanent supernatural property — its descendants run from Harlan Ellison's anthology sequel to a thousand screen variations — and early evidence of Bloch's pivot from cosmic to human monsters.
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