Spring Heeled Jack: The Terror of London (Dodo Press) [Paperback]

Anonymous (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 7, 2008

“Out of the enormous army of highwaymen, footpads, and housebreakers, who have made themselves famous or infamous in the annals of English crime, probably not one ever succeeded in gaining such a large amount of notoriety in so short a space of time as the subject of our present sketch, Spring-Heeled Jack. This quickly acquired reputation was the result, probably, of the veil of mystery which shrouded the identity of the man who was known on all hands as the Terror of London. ”

Product Details

• Paperback: 104 pages
• Publisher: Dodo Press (November 7, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1409917134
• ISBN-13: 978-1409917137
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,860,205 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Over the top Penny Dreadful Goodness!, August 21, 2009

By 

William J. Notte (Vermont) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Spring Heeled Jack: The Terror of London (Dodo Press) (Paperback)

This book pretty much sums up why I love POD. Ever since I read a Weekly Reader article in the fourth grade about penny dreadfuls I have wanted to read the adventures of Spring-Heeled Jack. Sadly, there were too few of us who wanted to do so, which meant that unless someone was willing to put the time and money into searching out an old out of print paperback or (even more hardcore) the original penny dreadfuls themselves then he just had to do without. No offense Jack, but under these conditions I have chosen to do without for the past few decades.

Now that print on demand technology is so easy and inexpensive, however, there are numerous companies out there scanning in every out of print book they can get their hands on and making it available POD on Amazon. Let me now sing the praises of Dodo Press, who did the edition of this book that I have had the pleasure of reading. Some if not most POD companies produce books that look as though no human eyes ever scanned their pages or in fact gave any thought to their appearance whatsoever. In many cases you can buy three POD books from the same publisher and they will all have the same stock photo on the cover, if there is a cover image at all: many use just one design template, maybe one frame or bar of color, with only the title and author name changing from book to book. And while being nitpicky about the cover should not detract from a reader's enjoyment, all too often the interior pages of a POD book are enough to make me shudder, both as a reader and as someone who works in book publishing. The scanning programs that are used on these books are prone to error. Exclamation points are read as the number 1. The letters rn are frequently read as the letter m--in fact I am currently proofreading a book for work that is a new edition of an older Chinese astrology book of ours where on just about every page I have to make a correction in regards to someone being "bom in the year of..." While I understand that most POD companies are tiny operations that are attempting to catalog thousands of books, I still say that while I am not expecting real attention to detail in regards to layout, etc., I do not think it is too much to ask to run a spell check before deeming the book ready for print. In sum, most POD publishers set the bar so low that one suspects the only reason a reader would have a positive experience wading through all the typos in their books is because this inconvenience is weighed against the fact that said reader has quite possibly been searching for said book for years if not decades. My Dodo press edition of Spring-Heeled Jack: The Terror of London, however, was not such a balancing act between enjoyment at finally finding a book and frustration with a half-assed publishing job. First off, instead of a generic cover, there is an actual illustration of Spring-Heeled Jack from an old penny dreadful! Then the interior pages contain no more typos than the average amount in any small press book, meaning either someone took the time to spell check or just that they got lucky with the scan. So nice to have a POD book for which it appears some thought and effort was invested.

To be honest, the layout of this one did require some thought: namely how to make it extend the text long enough to seem like a real book. This was done with double spacing between each paragraph and the kerning of the text makes it obvious that they were trying to stretch the page count of this as far as they possibly could. If this text was laid out in the standard style we use where I work for our classic books I doubt this would have topped forty-five pages. Not that I am holding this against Dodo Press. They didn't leave any material out and just worked with what they had. At $12.95 I certainly do not feel cheated with my purchase.

To get to the actual story, Spring-Heeled Jack was a legendary character who supposedly stalked the streets of London. In popular imagination of the time he was quite nasty, singling out women and children, blowing fire into their faces, scaring them half to death, and generally behaving as the type of supernatural chap one hopes a bevy of priests will be able to drive out of your hometown. He was named, by the way, for his ability to leap superhuman distances to avoid capture whenever the authorities arrived to break up his evil deeds. When the popularity of penny dreadfuls skyrocketed it was only natural that several would be devoted to Jack. The story that Dodo Press has chosen to print (meaning the story that they were able to scan a copy of) follows a few standard conventions. First in regards to Jack, he is portrayed as a hero (even in the penny dreadfuls glorying in the exploits of villainy was generally unusual) whose actual actions (which the author has thanks to access to Jack's diary--another standard convention) were twisted by rumor and copycats into a legend of villainy. Second, this is the story of a young man, unlawfully turned out of possession of his ancestral home with no obvious source of help, who though his own diligence and perseverance brings the villain to justice (in this case an evil cousin) and reclaims his rightful title. This was standard fare for penny dreadfuls and is really more a case of adapting Spring-Heeled Jack to the penny dreadful than it is adapting the penny dreadful to Spring-Heeled Jack. Also following penny dreadful conventions, the hero was given a sidekick from a lower class (in this case the sailor who swam him to safety from the shipwreck that killed his parents [thus setting up the inheritance dilemma]). In this case, time has not been kind to the sidekick as he has the unfortunate name of Ned Chump.

To sum, while I cannot imagine recommending this book to a single friend, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to finally get my hands on Spring-Heeled Jack after almost three decades of anticipation and while I knew exactly where the plot was going the entire time, the breakneck pace of said plot and the over the top quality of the writing (My favorite line from the book [after a two sentence character sketch]: "Rumor also added that she was a maniac.") kept me going, brimming over with reading enjoyment for the couple of hours it took me to read this. If you are at all curious about penny dreadfuls this would be a good book to check out.

My one hope now, Spring-Heeled Jack related, is that Dodo Press or some other POD publisher will get their hands on some of the other Spring-Heeled Jack penny dreadfuls that were released during the heyday of both Jack and penny dreadfuls and give modern readers even more access to this interesting character. (There is a second POD Spring-Heeled Jack available on Amazon from another publisher, but thankfully this publisher bucked the trend of their brethren in regards to just placing a book on Amazon and not bothering to add any information beyond title, price, and page count, so I was able to "look inside the book" and see that this second publisher is offering the same version of the story as the one I purchased from Dodo Press.)

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great "penny dreadful", October 31, 2008

By 

Kurt G. Schumacher "Grey" (Broomfield, CO USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Spring-Heeled Jack - The Terror of London (Kindle Edition)

It's great to see some of the "pulp fiction" from the past coming back into availability.

Spring Heeled Jack was a character who was reported to make bizarre appearances in Victorian England. He was the inspiration for a number of plays and penny dreadful novels (of which this is one). Search for Spring Heeled Jack on Wikipedia for the history of his appearances and theories about his identity... or if he was real at all!

In this novel, Jack is portrayed as a hero. He is deprived of his inheritance by a greedy relative, and spends the course of the novel extracting revenge, terrorizing the usurper, and ultimately regaining his rightful place.

Jack dresses in a costume designed to instill fear into wrongdoers. He appear out of nowhere, in a terrifying costume, including a mask and cape. It would be easy to see him as one of the inspirations for Batman!

This version of the story was published as a serial in "The Boys' Standard" in 1878-79. The style is what you would expect from this time period: lurid, and pretty stilted by today's standard.

But I like reading from different time periods, and I enjoy "pulp" stories like the detective and adventure stories from the 30's and 40's. So I enjoyed this story a lot. It's a quick read, I finished it in a couple of evenings.

I recommend this to anyone who likes pulp adventure stories.