Z pekla / barevné vydání – Moore Alan (2021)

London, autumn of 1888. The scene of five brutal murders of prostitutes. The perpetrator? A mythical being named Jack the Ripper. Scene: an unrealistically beautiful and slightly tipsy prostitute walks down a darkened street, falsely humming a period song. Cut to the shadow of a man with a top hat on his head and a bag in his hand, cast against a cold, damp wall. She notices someone is following her. She quickens her pace, he does too, the sound echoing well on the cobblestones. The heavily breathing hooker darts into a side alley, the killer follows her. Then a shot of a raised knife, her face, a scream, blood splatters, perhaps on a musical poster. Fade to black, another shot of a policeman exhaling: 'Oh God,' and whistling on his whistle. Well, that is the stereotype of Jack the Ripper as we know it from film – and nothing like that can be found in Moore's novel. Moore does not hide the fact that the death of those hookers somewhere in a side alley was disgusting, miserable, and undeserved. He does not allow readers to escape into a comfortable horror cliché; on the contrary, he shows the terrible and unembellished truth. But that alone would not be enough. In the novel, it is not important who the murderer is (we actually know that from the first page), but how and why it all happened. And so the reader, just like detective Dirk Gently in Douglas's books...