My Rating
“Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper!”
Greenwich Village, on the corner of 4th and MacDougal, a crowd has gathered to watch as police officers cordon off the scene of an apparent homicide. A young redheaded woman has become the fourth victim this month. As the ambulance crew prepares to remove the body, two men stand beneath a nearby streetlight discussing the gruesome murder. One of them, a psychiatrist named John Carmody, begins offering his theories on the recent string of slayings.
The other man, a much older gentleman named Sir Guy Hollis, quickly dismisses the doctor’s conclusions. Hollis is no ordinary investigator. He works for Scotland Yard and has spent years following a trail of ritualistic murders across cities and countries around the world. In his mind, these are not the random killings of some deranged serial killer. There is a pattern—one that stretches all the way back to the infamous Whitechapel murders of 1888 and Jack the Ripper himself.
Alive?
John Carmody laughs at the suggestion. How could Jack the Ripper possibly still be alive? Everyone dies eventually, even homicidal maniacs. Sir Guy Hollis has a simple answer: black magic. He believes the killer stalking Greenwich Village is the very same monster who terrorized the streets of London decades earlier, somehow using ritual murder to cheat death itself.
Carmody agrees to disagree but offers to help the Englishman navigate Greenwich Village by introducing him to several residents and shop owners in the neighborhood. Their search soon leads them toward a house party up the street, where Hollis hopes his decades-long hunt may finally come to an end.
Can Sir Guy Hollis convince the young psychiatrist that Jack the Ripper has escaped both time and justice? Does the killer bear a rope-like scar across his forearm? Can black magic really keep a murderer alive for generations?
“More Than Blood!”
Something sinister is happening to the athletes of Westfield Heights High School. For the past two years, the school’s best baseball and basketball players have mysteriously collapsed during games. Even Jimmy Ryan, Westfield’s all-state track star, suddenly stopped in the middle of an event and stared blankly into space like some horror-movie zombie.
Now Paul Williams, the school’s top basketball player, suspects something supernatural has cursed Westfield Heights. His girlfriend, Linda, reluctantly agrees to help investigate the strange illnesses—as long as the mystery keeps Paul’s mind off sports for a while. Unfortunately, the doctors have no answers. They appear just as bewildered as Paul.
What strange force is draining the minds and bodies of Westfield Heights’ best athletes? Can Linda help uncover the truth despite being a newcomer to the school? How many times can the basketball team turn certain victory into another humiliating defeat?
“The Girl Who Couldn’t Die”
It is the 19th century, an age of incredible breakthroughs in science and medicine. What previous generations considered impossible now seems within humanity’s grasp. Among those pushing the boundaries of medical science is a brilliant young graduate named Dr. Lee Fuller, whose experiments involving the regeneration of dead tissue have impressed both his peers and the medical establishment.
Life had given Dr. Fuller everything a man of his talents could desire—until his beloved wife, Lisa, fell ill and died. Grief soon gives way to obsession. Fuller refuses to accept that death must be permanent. He knows he can bring Lisa back. He only needs to discover the correct serum. After all, he is a genius. Everyone has told him so. He simply needs more time.
After secretly exhuming his wife’s corpse and placing it inside a vacuum-sealed chamber, Dr. Fuller begins his greatest experiment: defeating death itself.
What combination of chemicals can rekindle the spark of life? Will the modern electric heart provide the missing piece of Fuller’s experiment? How many years will the obsessed doctor sacrifice before his beloved Lisa returns to the mortal coil?
Reviewer Notes
I came for Jack the Ripper and found myself reading another horror anthology. With Robert Bloch, the legendary writer of Psycho, prominently featured on the cover, I was expecting a full-length story devoted to everyone’s favorite Victorian serial killer. Nope. While “Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper!” is easily the highlight of the issue, I still felt a little cheated when it ended so quickly. Give me twenty pages of Jack stalking Greenwich Village and I would have been perfectly happy.
The story adapts Robert Bloch’s classic “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” originally published in Weird Tales in 1943, and even in condensed comic-book form, it remains a great little horror tale. I also find it amusing how often both Marvel and DC used Greenwich Village as ground zero for supernatural insanity during this era. Seriously, considering how much bad shit happened down there in 1970s comic books, you would think the city would have stationed the National Guard on every street corner. Vampires, demons, sorcerers, serial killers—maybe it was time to start developing some other neighborhoods, guys.
The issue contains two additional stories. “More Than Blood!” follows a group of high school athletes suffering from a mysterious condition that leaves them physically and mentally drained. I enjoyed the setup, and the high-school setting gives the story a different flavor from the Ripper tale, although the explanation becomes fairly obvious before the final reveal. It is still a decent little mystery and probably my second-favorite story in the book.
“The Girl Who Couldn’t Die,” however, did very little for me. The mad-scientist-brings-his-dead-wife-back-to-life concept certainly belongs in a horror anthology, but by this point I had already been teased with Jack the Ripper and wanted more of that story. The 19th century? So yesterday. We’re over it. Bring me back to Greenwich Village and give Sir Guy Hollis another twenty pages to hunt Jack! Overall, Journey Into Mystery #2 is a solid anthology with one excellent lead story, one enjoyable backup, and one tale I could have lived without. Three out of five stars.