A bold and original novel about John Humble, the Yorkshire Ripper hoaxer.
In this provocative novel Mark Blacklock portrays the true and complex history of John Humble, aka Wearside Jack, the Ripper Hoaxer, a timewaster and criminal, sympathetic and revolting, the man hidden by a wall of words, a fiction-spinner worthy of textual analysis. In this remarkable work, John Humble leads the reader into an allusive, elusive labyrinth of interpretations, simultaneously hoodwinking and revealing.
I'm Jack is a riveting novel about truth, lies, prison and shame. It is also a profound and furious love letter to Sunderland. It is a puzzle, a hoax, a multi-voice portrait and a virtuoso assemblage of textual elements. I'm Jack announces the arrival of a radically talented and innovative novelist.
Industry Reviews
A gripping study in self-invention - and, ultimately, self-erasure - Tom McCarthy
Here are dark telegrams from an expertly realised otherness that is Sunderland. Spare. Swift. Smart. And dangerous. Carrying us through maps of shame to rescue a convincing fiction of the past from its sullen entropy - Iain Sinclair
The varied range and wit of his polyphonic chorus are reminiscent of Joe Orton's darkly subversive correspondence pranks... [An] intelligent [and] disturbing slice of noir - Catherine Taylor, Guardian
An audacious exercise in mimicry... Its tone is mischievous, with a vein of dark, crafty humour - though the overall effect is sombre. Blacklock's Humble is impossible to like; yet by the end it is almost impossible not to feel sorry for him - Austin Collings, Financial Times
Less a novel and more an assault on the senses, I'm Jack cleverly uses inter-textual trickery and deft Mackem parlance to create a portrait of a man obsessed. It is a forensic montage, a frenzied confessional and a stark commentary on the effects of public notoriety. Moving, haunted and necessary - Benjamin Myers, author, Pig Iron
Compelling, troubling, fascinating, a delight to read. It is a sublime anti-novel and a brilliantly original intervention into a most peculiar episode of recent history - James Miller, author, Lost Boys
Absorbing and fascinating. Using multi-layered storytelling, a deep personal knowledge of Sunderland past, present and legend in a believable and hard-hitting blend of fact and imagination, it paints a genuinely disturbing vision of an obsessive, calculating and ultimately self-destructive personality - Bryan Talbot, author, Dotter of Her Father's Eyes
A deftly executed ventriloquist act, it's anchored in the true story of notorious hoaxer John Humble... The book itself is just as slippery - Hephzibah Anderson, Observer
[An] intriguing debut... There is an air of grubby menace throughout - Ben Myers, New Statesman
The ageing Humble is a figure lost on the margins of society: alcoholic, in and out of gaol and lacking any real relationship... [Suggesting] that crime might be understood by looking at the particular social situations that contribute to it, Blacklock presents Humble as far from 'evil' but a melancholic echo of a wider deprivation - Jerome de Groot, History Today
