The Prowler in The City at The Edge of The World - Plot Summary

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.