Mayhem

There are times when it feels like the entire neo-Victorian enterprise is built on representations of female corpses--the more brutalized, the better.  Dead female bodies, especially the bodies of prostitutes, are one of the key signifiers of neo-Victorian revisionism: commodified, victimized, and ultimately reduced to waste matter, these bodies bear the weight of many neo-Victorian novels' assumptions about patriarchy, economics, gender, and sexuality, especially as they played out at the end of the nineteenth century.  That is, the dead female body in general and the dead prostitute's body in particular crystallize neo-Victorianism's sense that nineteenth-century women were forever being made and remade into disposable objects for men's (frequently sadistic) pleasures, in a way that miniaturized other social relations (between the aristocracy and the poor, for example).    

This is a roundabout way of suggesting that neo-Victorian fiction's obsession with Jack the Ripper sometimes takes narratives down unintended paths.  One of the most recent expeditions into Ripperfic, Sarah Pinborough's neo-Victorian Gothic Mayhem, is a case in point.  Mayhem actually combines Jack the Ripper with a lesser-known contemporary series of killings, the Thames Torso Murders--then seeks to explain the latter (and the impulse for the former) by invoking a Eastern European vampire, the upir, which has hitchhiked to London on the back (literally) of a young Englishman.  The narrative rotates through multiple POV characters, including the first-person POV of Dr. Thomas Bond.  Bond joins up with a bizarre Catholic priest whose job description involves hunting down upirs, among other things, and a Jewish immigrant, Aaron Kosminski, who suffers from psychic visions; together, this sub-Draculaesque trio work together, not very affectionately, to do in the upir before it does in more women.  

"Three, the power of three" (232), says Aaron, who for some reason points to "The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost" as an example of such symbolic power.  (I thought he was Jewish?)  In any event, the three men suggest a coming-together of the power of the Church, the professional sciences, and the common people against the supernatural menace posed by the upir.  The novel operates according to conventional Victorian Gothic logic: Dr. Bond, who possesses a "rational brain" (184), is the professional gentleman who must learn to take instruction from both popular superstition (Aaron) and religious lore (the priest) before evil can be vanquished.  "I knew my own mind was too rational to have created something like that" (258), Bond thinks to himself after seeing the upir.  In this repetition of nineteenth-century Gothic in general and Dracula in particular,  the "modern" man discovers that his own secular, empirical tools provide no means of handling the return of the supernatural repressed--which, here, is also foreign into the bargain.  Notably, though, it is the Englishman who decides that he wants to have an "adventure" in Poland, despite the "unrest" (132), who brings the upir back with him, not the Polish immigrants (whose folkloric wisdom is key to solving the problem).  In effect, the English traveler, taking his American friend's advice to "see" rather than "experience" the struggles of the people (132), is punished for his objectifying tourism: stumbling into places where he is neither wanted nor useful, the tourist lacks the popular wisdom that would warn him that not all boundaries can be charted on a map.  

In case you'd like to avoid spoilers, I'll put the rest below the fold.