A Landscape of Fear: "From Hell" and the Twentieth Century

This essay reads Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell as an unorthodox tractatus on space-time and a paranoiac, political retelling of history. In the graphic novel, the Whitechapel murders are presented as a symbolical generator for the violence of the twentieth century through a meaningful association with the Holocaust. Through a four-dimensional outlook, Moore presents a metaphorical, non-causal way of thinking about history that represents the latter as a Lovecraftian “landscape of fear.” The essay examines From Hell’s geo-historical dimension and its use of a wide variety of sources to demonstrate how its oblique account of late nineteenth-century London can be interpreted as a militant comment on our “fraught modern world.”