The Shadow of Jack the Ripper

In the gaslit streets of London, a story is hunting for a narrator. And it’s a story that kills.Callum Hayes is obsessed. As the guide for London’s premiere Jack the Ripper tour, he has made a career of walking the blood-soaked cobblestones of Whitechapel, reciting the history of the world’s most infamous unsolved murders. His “unsettlingly passionate” delivery is his brand. But one rain-slicked night in Mitre Square, his performance becomes terrifyingly real.He has a vision: a modern woman is murdered with the same savage precision as the Ripper’s canonical victims. When her body is discovered the next day, Callum is plunged into a nightmare where history is not just repeating, but actively hunting him. He begins to experience impossible visions and temporal glitches, even finding a fragment of an antique knife in his own nosebleed. The Story is inside him.Teamed up with a sharp, skeptical archivist named Eleanor, Callum discovers a chilling precedent: a tour guide who vanished in the 1970s and a Victorian constable who went mad after handling the original Ripper evidence. He is the next in a cursed line of narrators, chosen by a sentient, predatory legend that infects its storytellers, using their bodies as a vessel to replay its gruesome art.Now a prime suspect in the new killings and haunted by an entity that speaks with his own voice, Callum must race to find a series of occult “anchors” that tie the story to reality. But his quest for a way to destroy the legend reveals a horrifying truth: he isn’t just being possessed by the story. He may have been written by it from the very beginning.A masterful blend of historical thriller, supernatural horror, and meta-narrative dread, The Shadow of Jack the Ripper is a terrifying exploration of how stories shape us, and how some stories are hungry. It’s a must-read for fans of tales where history itself is the monster.