The Emotional Cost on Writing About Jack…

 

Jack the Ripper's Bedroom (c. 1907). Oil on canvas, Walter Sickert, Manchester City Gallery.

The Ripper, I mean.

It’s my turn, among countless writers before me, who have taken a crack at the man that struck terror in London’s East End for ten weeks in 1888.

Every angle, every facet, has been examined and penned, fiction and non-fiction.

So, the question remains. Why me? What can I offer that others have not?

My meeting face-to-face with the knife-wielding serial killer.

That might make a change.

Yes, I’m taking a virtual plane, and flying over to London to interview Jack. He and I will share a pint or two or three with gut rot gin shots, talking over his old times. He will take me on a tour of the murder sites, replay his methods in madness, and confess his reasons why.

Me alone with Jack, who is now a feeble old man. Oddly enough, God granted him a long life.

The obstacle — there’s always at least one in every hard-won tale — is how to survive the meeting? I’m talking surviving emotionally, psychologically, when what I’ll be facing is pure evil, black ink not blood running through the man’s veins.

My book, entitled, “I, Jack–My Interview with Jack the Ripper is already a quarter down on the page. The initial scenes, I envisioned early on. They were fairly easy to pen. It was just me in the iconic East End pub, the Ten Bells, sitting opposite a wizened-up septuagenarian, asking questions all of us have wanted answers to for some 137 years.

But when it was time for Jack to take me back to the Autumn of Terror ’88, and have me witness his first kill — seeing, hearing, smelling, and those vicious, frenzied stabs — well, that was a thing apart. A living nightmare no one, not even a curious wordsmith, should endure.

Penning the scene Jack laid out before me, I started to lose pieces of my humanity. My soul was ripped up the center, like the torsos of Jack’s innocent victims.

Yet, I know there are scenes which must be in the book, for at heart only the raw truth matters in moments like this. But even I, who has never avoided writing about death, have left blank spots on the page where that truth must stand, for I have yet to find the courage to pen what I see in my mind’s eye.

In essence, I, Jack is a morality tale. How in satisfying one’s curiosity about evil, a human can murder their soul.  

The book must reveal the true horror of what occurred on those grimy streets in the wee hours of the night. Where the cold and the damp and the wretched decay will penetrate you well before Jack’s knife does.

In the end, Jack’s tale is timeless. Abusive acts born out of abuse. In Jack’s backstory, physical and emotional terror existed. And as so with most serial killers, the abused go on to abuse, maiming and hurting in far greater ways to avenge their deadened souls.

And through it all, there will be only me facing Jack. A single female traveller headed across The Pond to witness and record what no one ever should.

v The length and width of Jack’s blade.

v The depth and number of pockets in his pea coat.

v The scary strength still remaining in his age-spotted, gnarled hands.

v The smells, the sounds, the slimy grime which invades the nostrils and will not let go.

v And the blood. God help me. All the blood.

But to recreate one must relive. A writer has no escape from the naked truth, as there was none for those poor Unfortunates in Jack’s deadly grasp.

I pound the keyboard.

I flip my scene cards.

In a kind of self-preservation, desperation, I all too quickly bang out the words.

So, I can flee what I’m experiencing.

The result is no good, of course. I must return. I must properly flesh out the draft. I must force myself to stay put in those ghastly scenes, to view longer, experience more, to describe better.

The process makes me sick.

A kind of sour taste overtakes my mouth. My stomach churns. My need to rocket off this chair and go and do anything but pen this awful tale…

But that’s not how Jack wants it. And that’s not how this tale gets told.

I intend to publish I, Jack sometime in the autumn — the Autumn of Terror. I didn’t plan the synchronicity. It’s just how this writer’s experience has unfolded. Fate is a funny thing.

I said after penning my first serial killer book I’d never write on serial killers again. It takes too much of an emotional toll. Yet here I am because Jack called my name. And like an idiot, I answered the call to sit across from the being whose hands never leave his cane and whose eyes never leave mine.

Crikey, I really need my head examined. I really do. To assuage my lunacy, I think, What can possibly happen? Yes, indeed, what possibly can?

Have you ever wanted to sit down with Jack the Ripper, and have him tell you, show you, all?

Dear reader, be careful what you wish for. You might just get it and not survive The End.

~~~

I, Jack will drop in the Fall of 2025. I hope I’m sane enough then to enjoy the launch.