A Toy for Juliette

"A Toy for Juliette" is a short story by Robert Bloch from Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, about Jack the Ripper, being pulled into a dystopic future by a sadistic femme fatale and her mysterious grandfather. There, she attempts to seduce him, only for Jack to find a knife underneath a pillow in her bed. The rest is left to the reader's imagination. Ellison wrote a sequel for the same anthology called "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World".

Bloch incorporates themes of dystopic libertarianism—the title character, Juliette, is named after the Marquis de Sade's Juliette. Sade was the man for whom "sadism" is named, and Bloch often uses his works in connection with the mentally unstable, such as his character Norman Bates in Psycho.

External links

• A Toy for Juliette title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database