Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

There will be those that look upon the events in Whitechapel during the summer and autumn of 1888 as the gift that keeps giving. A morally objectionable standpoint in which to view the murder of five or more women during the reign of fear imposed by one or more individuals as a sideshow, a ghoulish fairground in which many take delight in the detail without ever seeing the truth of the women at the time who were slayed, and the plight of the working class in a city that was at the heart of Empire.

Yet the events of that time still find a way into our subconscious, they underpin our fear that somewhere out there is the manifestation of evil that lurks in the veins of every human; for every person on the planet can lose control and taking a life, and once you take one, you can take another.

There are two ways to approach the sheer sense of depravity at the hands of a killer, one is absolute fact and diligence to the cause of exposing the sheer scale of misogyny that exists in the mystery of Jack the Ripper and for that there is no finer example than the phenomenal book The Five by Hailie Rubenhold; and the other is to see it through the eyes of fiction, of subverting the canonical text and placing the events into a place where truth is capsized, not sunk, not relegating or dismissing the practise of diligent research, but moulding it to a realm where others who have focused on the gore and the myth fear to tread.

D. E. McCluskey travels down the road of enjoyable fiction by rejecting the focus of criminologists and so-called Ripperologists and the way they twist the narrative to name the responsible party without asking the pertinent question of how and why the woman were in the area at the time, and instead producing a book of science-fiction and crime case scenario in one terrifically blended, and seamless tale.

D. E. McCluskey’s Time Ripper is not perhaps what you would expect from a book inspired by the events of 1888. There is no sense of wild examination of salaciousness, no performance of the mind in which the details get lost in the fog that everybody associates with the time-period, but instead there is a reason, an alternative narrative which straddles 1888 and 2288, and in a world of differing realities, the inversion of consequence is turned upon its head.

It is the what if moment that many readers enjoy that D.E. McCluskey has found to be the inspiration for this book, what if the event had happen to save the future, and this by no means is an easy feat to pull off in a modern landscape that asks, quite rightly, that we see the dead, not as victims with no story to their name except the usual tired and badly researched old tropes of fallen women or prostitutes, but as living human beings who had a life, who fell because of the way that Britain, England, and successive Victorian Governments refused to acknowledge women as anything other than second class citizens.

Time Ripper is a feat of sheer determination and class storytelling, engaging, mindful, respectful, but also one not afraid to speak in the tongue of the time. A tale weaved by a master.

Ian D. Hall