Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post.

At first glance, it seems odd for David Hartwell to characterize “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” Harlan Ellison’s brutally pessimistic portrait of existential horror and urban misery based on apocryphal accounts of the Kitty Genovese murder, as a moral allegory. It’s a story where the evil is pervasive and all-encompassing, where the existential threat is too large to be reckoned with, and where even the final moments of catharsis are (in context) resoundingly pessimistic. It would be easy to assume there is no moral, just an unrelenting indictment of the senseless terror and torture of modern urban living.

While it’s true “Whimper” is pessimistic, the ceaseless torture that the childish god at the center of the story—and indeed, the story itself—inflicts upon its denizens does in fact have a point: It’s a chilling and twisted parable of how systems of abuse and control gain compliance from their subjects. Ellison’s work, while couched in a pessimistic snarl, is a story that uses the themes of existential and urban horror to explore the wider question of exactly how an individual—even one filled with empathy and good intentions—can find themselves caught up in the torture and death of their fellow human beings.

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