The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World

"The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World", is a short story from Harlan Ellison's 1967 anthology, Dangerous Visions, in which he presents a collection of several different views of science fiction and fantasy, through 34 authors (himself included). This was his story.

Plot summary

It is written as a follow-up to Robert Bloch's story (immediately before it in the book), "A Toy for Juliette". In it, the legendary Jack the Ripper has been somehow yanked into a futuristic metropolis of sterility, where anyone is free to do what they want, however arcane or illegal. He is brought before Juliette, a girl who is appropriately named after the Marquis de Sade's Juliette.

Upon killing Juliette, much to the delight of a City denizen who seems to be either her father or lover (or both), Jack the Ripper is transported back to London, where he commits another of his infamous killings. However, he is surprised to find out that there are other mental presences or personalities somehow coexisting within his own mind, commenting on the brutality of the act as if they are audience members or high-society socialites critiquing a work of art in a museum.

It eventually becomes clear that, although recognizably human in form, the future City’s denizens in fact have powers of matter manipulation, time travel, and telepathy. They thus can both read and manipulate Jack the Ripper's mind, and they eventually proceed (for their own malign amusement) to mentally expose him to his own sub-conscious lusts, desires, and petty hatreds that he had previously suppressed but which had actually driven him to his infamous crimes. The Ripper character realizes that he had subconsciously persuaded himself that his killings were purely moralistic in intent, meant to draw attention to the injustices, inequalities, social wretchedness, and debauchery of industrial, Victorian society. To Jack’s despair, his “true,” completely base motivations are fully revealed to him by the City’s denizens, after which they delight in his ensuing psychological anguish.

Once aware of their presence, he is then yanked back again to the City of the future by its seemingly superhuman inhabitants, for purposes that are not yet evident. He kills one of the original members of the City’s social group in rage.

In the final denouement, Jack the Ripper is fooled by the City into believing that this destructive act in their presence has created a breakdown in their utopia and their ability to control the City’s functioning. He is implicitly led to believe that he has all the power and is an uncontrollable, random evil in their presence. He uses this perceived power to go on his own killing spree meant to terrify the City’s residents and punish them for their mockery of his motives and their use of him as a puppet. After murdering scores of city denizens in the harshest manner imaginable, in a veritable frenzy of bloodlust (described by Ellison in unflinching detail), Jack finds out to his own horror that the City in fact allowed him to pursue his path of destruction out of a collective yearning for maximum entertainment value. Having their desires sated, the still-living City denizens use their collective mental control over physical matter to disarm him, leaving him to roam the still-clean, still-gleaming and bright City streets aimlessly, shouting and asserting that he really is a "bad man," a man to be respected and feared rather than mocked and thrown aside.

“Prowler” in the Context of Ellison’s Larger Body of Work

Ellison has given few clues as to the artistic or socio-political goals of this piece of grand guignol, which is perhaps not surprising, given that his writing style has often been depicted as stream-of-consciousness in nature, at least once a story finally comes to fruition or maturity in his mind. Notably, Ellison's writing style is highly emotive, extremely expressive, sometimes aggressive in choice of grammar, and filled with moral outrage or alternatively, poignant, nostalgic, bittersweet sensibilities. He employs a direct, punchy writing style that seems intended to shock, entertain, and provoke the reader, all at once. Despite this approach, which some might liken to a verbal assault, Ellison is a self-professed, deeply social and political writer who means for his stories to engender serious thought as well as visceral emotional reactions.

In “Prowler,” despite Ellison’s overt use of multiple characters with purely sadistic motivations, the narrative is clearly meant thematically as a strong critique of moral nihilism. In turn, he depicts such collective social nihilism as a possible outcome of the creation of a far-future material paradise. Notably, while Jack the Ripper is certainly portrayed by the author as psychotic, vicious, and dangerous, he is also depicted as having a strong moral sensibility, however self-delusional or self-serving in nature. In stark contrast, the far-future City denizens are depicted as completely jaded, hardened, and Machiavellian in character, their main purpose seeming to be to sate their own desires, often at the expense of each other, including the titillation that comes from voyeuristic death and mutilation.

Meanwhile, the amoral – even sociopathic – nature of the citizenry acts as a stark contrast to the City itself, which consists of spotless architecture that seems impervious to the ravages of age and physical decay. Thus, Ellison’s implicit social critique is seen in the paradoxical fact that the hyper-modern, gleaming, futuristic, brightly metallic City that he describes is, in fact, inhabited by people who are far more cruel and vicious in their amorality than Jack the Ripper himself, who comes from the dank, dark, and impoverished streets of Victorian London. Indeed, the City’s citizens have apparently become so bored in the midst of this perfection that their notion of amusement and even artistry and creativity is to pursue the mental stimulation that comes from watching heinous, barbarous acts of graphic violence. Thus, Ellison posits that a perfect material existence could create humans (or post-humans) so venal that they would easily outstrip the infamous Jack the Ripper in the depths of their depravity.

Similarities to 21st Century Horror Films Depicting Torture

Ellison’s short story could also be seen as predictive of 21st century trends. Specifically, it could be viewed as a prescient commentary on the eventual move toward “splatter films,” or more specifically, a sub-genre of horror films starting in the early 2000s that are now collectively referred to as “torture porn.” There is a growing filmography in which tension and fear come not from traditional use of suspense but rather purely from the depiction of graphic mutilation, torture, and highly painful, drawn-out deaths of innocent people. His story incorporates literary images of murder and mutilation that would be well at home in movies such as the hugely popular Saw and Hostel film series – movies that have drawn increasing opprobrium from concerned sociologists and public commentators for their meticulous depictions of physical and mental torture. However, the difference between Ellison's early work and the latter sub-genre of modern horror films is that Ellison's story is meant as a strong critique of such violence and sadism, even though he is every bit as explicit as these contemporary films.

Themes Carried forward into Other Works

Ellison would go on to create another work with shocking racial, ethnic, and political violence, "Knox," published in 1974, depicting an alternate American reality in which a fascist government party has taken power, with paramilitary links to militant societal groupings. Like in "Prowler," the moral lessons of Knox are not easily discerned upon first reading, and the uninitiated reader could leave their first exposure to either story believing that Ellison is a glorifier of wantonly destructive and malicious violence. Instead, considering his entire opus of works and his prevalent self-commentaries on his own career and ethical motivations, it is clear he means to show how human beings, no matter how "modern" they become in sensibility, remain capable of using violence as a tool of power . In Knox, this power is used to terrify minority groups and suppress minority political views, thereby ensuring mainstream political submission.