Infernal (Plot) Devices

Infernal (Repairman Jack 9) by F. Paul Wilson (2005): Things continue to get dire for libertarian pulp hero Jack (no last name), as family and friends are again targeted as part of the build-up to armageddon. This time around, terrible events at New York's LaGuardia airport bring Jack's older brother back into his life for the first time in nearly 20 years.

But Jack's brother, a judge, is a self-involved, corrupt, drunk bastard. Nonetheless, Jack agrees to help him disappear before he's arrested by the authorities. But there's also the matter of a mysterious map and an even more mysterious treasure. Inimical to human life, the Otherness is on the move.

Jack's brother makes this a more enjoyable outing in this series than most -- he's a refreshing breath of sleaze and terrible decision-making. I'd have liked more of the historical flashbacks that explain how the mysterious treasure ended up sunk in the waters off Bermuda, but so it goes. There's a scene in which a character whips up a magical antidote that seems like a parody (pretty much all the ingredients can be bought in the course of a couple of hours). Is it a parody? I don't know. Recommended.

Harbingers (Repairman Jack 10) by F. Paul Wilson (2006): The history of the war between the Otherness and the Ally on Earth gets sketched in, as Jack runs into a secret society that's been doing the Ally's bidding for several hundred years. Perhaps more. That secret society believes Jack is The Heir, the fancy title for the guy who will be granted super-powers and immortality to act as the enemy to the Otherness's similarly powered Adversary. But no superpowers yet.

So we get more dire familial events, more appearances of the strange and prophetic woman and her dog, and a whole lot of explosions and shooting. We also finally see the Adversary, Rasalom, begin to move more openly against his enemies. And the cosmic near-indifference of the Ally -- still better than the cosmic malevolence of the Otherness, but not by much -- finally begins to be shown in full. Recommended.

Jack is a Jack is a Jack is a Jack

All the Rage (Repairman Jack 4) by F. Paul Wilson (2000): F. Paul Wilson's libertarian super-fixer returns. Jack's life keeps getting weirder as the massive cosmic battle between the Ally and the Otherness continues to escalate on Earth, and specifically in New York and New Jersey, Jack's primary stomping grounds.

This time around, Jack seeks to discover the source of a designer drug that makes its users feel invincible, and then compels them to commit acts of random and extreme violence. It's a solid entry in the series, albeit one with several dozen pages of skimmable moments. Along the way, we get several speeches about gun control and individual rights that, along with being glib, tend to stop the action dead. Oh, well. Recommended.

Hosts (Repairman Jack 5) by F. Paul Wilson (2001): Jack's back. So is Kate, his older sister, a successful pediatrician he hasn't seen in years. Her lesbian partner has turned weird after a seemingly successful treatment for brain cancer, so Kate phones Jack's business number to get help not knowing that Repairman Jack is also brother Jack. So we learn a bit more about Jack's personal history along the way.

It's the invading reality dubbed The Otherness again. This time around, it's using viruses to further its Earth-conquering goals. It's all a fairly plot-intensive romp, though Wilson's love of killing supporting characters really begins to shift into high gear. Really high gear. So be warned. Also, more lectures about gun control (Jack's against it) and taxes (Jack's against them, too). Recommended.

The Haunted Air (Repairman Jack 6) by F. Paul Wilson (2002): The first half of The Haunted Air is deeply satisfying in its choice of subject matter -- psychic frauds and the methods they use to be frauds. It's fun stuff, especially as Jack has been hired by one such fraud because he seems to have developed a 'real' supernatural problem: a haunted house.

Wilson's choice of the world of mediums and psychics is inspired. So, too, is the bizarre and murderous cult he invents, a cult whose murderous shenanigans eventually tie into the haunted house plot. It's really fun, breezy stuff -- well, as fun as the grim subject matter can be. Stay tuned for more lectures on the libertarian lifestyle, and one of Wilson's recurring riffs on the evils of Marcel Proust. Bonus points arise from the title, a quote from John Keats that's actually explained in the text. All this and a guest appearance of the Keep from Wilson's The Keep. A literal guest appearance. The Keep comes to Brooklyn! Recommended.

CrissCross (Repairman Jack 8) by F. Paul Wilson (2004): Wilson balances some of his most enjoyable, conspiracy-oriented world-building with some of the most brutal violence of the Repairman Jack series in this novel. We're introduced to Dormentalism, a New-Agey cult with more than a passing resemblance to Scientology by way of Mormonism. We're also introduced to a malignant supernatural tome, a piece of human skin that can neither be destroyed or lost by Jack, a nun with a problem, a squirmy blackmailer, an intrepid reporter, and the Opus Omega.

That last, the secret goal of Dormentalism, gets explained by the end of the text. Wilson's inventiveness really sings in the explanation of Dormentalism's secret history, its organizational structure, and its surface philosophy.Just don't get too attached to any of the supporting characters. Wilson's got a fever, and the only cure is more dead supporting characters! Recommended.

New World Disorder

Conspiracies (Repairman Jack #3)  by F. Paul Wilson (2000): Easily the zippiest, lightest of F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack novels that I've read. The setting for the 'A' plot helps with this, as Jack has to infiltrate a convention of conspiracy theorists in order to find a missing woman. He's never met that missing woman, but she left a message with her husband that if she disappeared, only Repairman Jack would be able to help help her. So against his better judgement, off Jack goes to the convention.

There, he'll meet and mingle with an assortment of One World, UFO, Hollow-Earth, Christian fundamentalist, and various and sundry other seriously invested conspiracy theorists. The missing woman had announced prior to the convention that her Sunday keynote speech would reveal a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory that would explain everything. Did someone kidnap or kill her to shut her up?

In what was then the third of the Repairman Jack books, Conspiracies does a certain amount of heavy lifting so as to make Jack's adventures part of the overarching Adversary Cycle. The Adversary himself, Rasalom, shows up in disguise to deliver a chapter worthy of Basil Exposition, laying out the framework of the massive secret war going on behind the scenes to Jack so as to judge whether or not Jack knows anything about it. He doesn't. But boy, is he going to learn.

A draggy B-plot detracts from the shenanigans -- with all these conspiracy theories floating around, the hiring of Jack to solve a domestic abuse situation just seems like a prosaic time-waster. More conspiracy theories! More weird events! More Tesla! More of the Blues-Brothers-like agents of Order known only as the Twins! And most of all, more of Rasalom's evil talking monkey! Recommended.

Misapplied Titles

The Devil Commands: adapted by Robert Andrews and Milton Gunzburg from the novel The Edge of Running Water by William Sloane; directed by Edward Dmytryk; starring Boris Karloff (Dr. Blair), Cy Schindell (Karl), Amanda Duff (Anne), Anne Revere (Mrs. Walters) and Richard Fiske (Richard) (1941): Moody, atmospheric horror film with Karloff as a Mad Scientist, or more accurately a sane scientist driven mad by his wife's death and the subsequent revelations about the afterlife as revealed by his investigations into brain function.

Frame narration from Karloff's daughter doesn't really help with suspense, but the movie as a whole is enjoyable. Karloff is more mournful and far less threatening than usual as the increasingly loopy scientist who believes that he can build a machine to communicate with the dead in general and his wife in particular. And what a machine! The final form of his 'Dead Set' really makes the whole movie worthwhile. It's Vacuum-Tube Gothic.

Other elements are perhaps a bit more rote, from the grieving daughter and her boring love interest to the wily sheriff. Karloff's hulking henchman Karl possesses a bit more pathos than most such characters, as we see the accident that 'creates' him. An unscrupulous 'fake' medium who turns out to have real psychic powers (shades of Ghost!) rounds out the major players.

Director Edward Dmytryk is better at mood and atmospherics than he is pacing -- the whole thing drags a bit, which shouldn't really happen with a 65-minute movie. Nonetheless, a grim and surprisingly downbeat movie for its time. Recommended.

 

The Tomb (2nd revised edition) by F. Paul Wilson (2004/ previously published in different form in 1984 and 1998): Originally the first appearance of Wilson's Repairman Jack character, The Tomb would later be substantially revised, along with a number of other Wilson novels, as the writer fleshed out his Adversary Cycle and the Repairman Jack series that wove in and out of that Cycle.

But originally, this was a 1984 one-off. There wouldn't be another Jack novel for about a decade. In the revised version, its timeline moved up to the 21st century, The Tomb has been retconned into the 21st century.

Jack is a sort of altrusitic, libertarian superman. Or supercompetentman. He's off the grid. He fixes problems for people, sometimes violently, sometimes not. 'The Tomb' wasn't Wilson's preferred title -- it was meant by the publisher to echo the title of Wilson's previous hit, The Keep, even though there's no actual tomb in the novel. Instead, there are mysterious disappearances in New York, flashbacks to mid-19th-century India, and terrible things hidden inside a mysterious freighter. There are monsters. Smelly, seemingly invincible monsters.

The good parts of The Tomb are very good: Jack's investigation is suspenseful, and both the historical sections and the horror sections of the novel are skilfully written. About three-quarters of the novel is thus an occasionally thoughtful page-turner. Unfortunately, about one-quarter of the novel focuses upon the love of Jack's life, Gia, and her idiot daughter Vicky. But by God, even though Wilson doesn't write children well doesn't mean he's not going to keep trying! And ditto for Gia, whose personality consists of about equal parts worrying about Vicky and mulling over Jack. That's all you're going to get, so don't wait around for wit. Well, she really enjoys cleaning things. I kid you not.

Vicky may be central to the plot, but you can still skim much of the material focused upon her and her mother. They're a tremendously dull pair (and will continue to be dull yet hazardous for every Repairman Jack novel) when they're not getting into trouble. And when Vicky gets into trouble late in this novel, it's through doing something stupid that spins off from Jack doing something stupid by not fully explaining something because if he'd fully explained something, we wouldn't have a hostage for the second climax of the novel. Oh, well. A lot of the Gia/Vicky sections don't feature Jack, meaning that skimming is pretty easy. Real, real easy. Recommended.

Needs Repairs

Aftershock and Other Stories by F. Paul Wilson (1990-2008; collected 2009): Wilson is the sort of literal-minded champion of plain-style prose whom some fans of fantasy and science fiction go completely gaga for. Stylistically, he makes Stephen King look like Thomas Ligotti and Thomas Ligotti look like James Joyce, thus pushing James Joyce into another prose universe altogether. At his best, he's a competent writer with some interesting ideas. He's also blazingly fast. If you don't like the new F. Paul Wilson novel, wait six months and read the next one.

Wilson promises in the notes included with this collection of short pieces that this will be his last original collection of short stories and novellas, as he's lost interest in the form. This claim may be a good thing if Wilson sticks to it, as the stories here range from the competent (the bafflingly award-winning title story) to the thuddingly bland (that would be at least half the collection). If the ideas aren't strong and strongly developed, Wilson has nowhere to fall back -- his is a plain and often cliche-ridden style with a tendency towards personal macro-phrases that pop up again and again in his work along with certain tropes and plot mechanisms.

For instance, a lot of women in Wilson's universe have breasts that are not too small and not too big but just a perfect handful. Common criminals tend to be physically ugly. Horror stories often centre around the punishment of a lazy male, sometimes guilty of murder, sometimes guilty of, um, laziness enabled by inherited money or the occasional bout of physical incompetence that the universe inevitably punishes with death. Most people other than the heroes and their close acquaintances tend to be either scum or sheep, something one sees in Wilson's Repairman Jack novels as well.

After all, Wilson has won about a million Prometheus Awards for fiction that champions the libertarian ideal. And Wilson's introductions and notes here show us just how concerned he is with productivity and money. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and apparently a lot of people like relatively unornamented, occasionally sentimental prose. So it goes. Not recommended.

This is the End

Nightworld: A Repairman Jack/ Adversary Cycle Novel by F. Paul Wilson (2012): If you've seen the mostly godawful Michael Mann movie The Keep, then you've met the Anti-Christ of F. Paul Wilson's apocalyptic Repairman Jack/ Adversary Cycle. The novel was much better. But that was him, rassling Scott Glenn after escaping from centuries of imprisonment thanks to those damn Nazis. Scott Glenn played Glaiken, Rasalom's equally old nemesis.

Well, here we are now, after more than 30 years, with the end of the whole shebang. Nightworld is a major revision of an earlier novel of the same name, changed to increase Repairman Jack's role in the apocalypse, among other things.

The Earth's days get impossibly shorter, day by day. In a week or so, the sun will set for the last time. Massive pits begin opening up across the planet. When night falls, giant carnivorous insects pour from the pits. Worse, larger things soon follow. Volcanoes erupt. Earthquakes shake the planet. And it's all just a preview of life on Earth once the Otherness fully arrives and Rasalom emerges from his cocoon to preside over the fallen Earth.

And so a ragtag group of heroes must find and reassemble a thingie that might allow them to defeat Rasalom and drive away the Otherness. Rasalom draws power from fear and despair in his cocoon below Central Park. And his former followers discover that he never intended them to share in the power on the day after Doomsday.

Nightworld mostly satisfies, though the massive body count of the previous installment leaves sympathetic characters a bit light on the ground, and the gathering of items (or 'plot coupons') is a fantasy trope that, much-used, is also pretty much standard at this point in the genre. Still, things remain tense and compulsively readable right to the end. Recommended.

Penultimate

The Dark Before the End: A Repairman Jack Novel by F. Paul Wilson (2011): One of the good things about the Repairman Jack series (which overlaps with the accompanying Adversary Cycle) is that one can pick it up well into the overall narrative and nonetheless be engaged by the goings-on. Even so, this is really The Empire Strikes Back of the series: it doesn't exactly have an ending, it just ends.

The ragtag group that opposes Rasalom (aka the Adversary) seems to have found a way to stop the apocalypse from occurring. And they'd better. If Rasalom's millennia-long plans come to fruition, Earth will be overrun by an inimical reality called the Otherness. That is so not good.

The plot hangs together, though things do get a bit touchy towards the end of the novel, and a certain amount rests on a slight bit of the old Idiot Plot formula, in which people do a stupid thing. Wilson's major characters are likeable, which makes the fate of some of them a bit hard to take. Wilson's peculiar and distinctive mix of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and thriller fiction goes down smoothly. Action Cthulhu!

It might be fairer from a packaging standpoint to combine this novel and the following Nightworld into one text, though I don't think Wilson will do so. After 30 years and more than 20 novels, his work seems to finally be almost done. Though three Repairman Jack prequels are promised in the afterword, so who knows? Recommended, though really only if you've read at least a couple of the previous Repairman Jack novels.

Not Long Before The End

Fatal Error: A Repairman Jack Novel by F. Paul Wilson (2010): The penultimate Repairman Jack novel sees Jack and friends trying to unravel yet another plot to plunge the world into eternal darkness. Good times, good times.

With the Lady -- the physical incarnation of humanity's collective consciousness called the noosphere, per Teilhard de Chardin -- already seriously depleted by previous assassination attempts, the Earth hangs in the balance. Should the Lady be destroyed, the Earth's protection from the Otherness will be removed, and pretty much literally all Hell will break loose as local reality becomes hostile to humanity's continued existence.

There's a grand conspiratorial lunacy to the Repairman Jack novels that's quite engaging. While the previous volume (Ground Zero) folded many of the 9/11 conspiracy theories into a Grand Unified Theory that was much, much weirder than anything in our world, Fatal Error plays with doomsday scenarios that involve the Internet. Much of the action centres on New York, the locus for most of the Repairman Jack novels, along with Jack's home-state of New Jersey.

Jack and his allies try to stop the End of the Internet for reasons I'll leave anyone who wants to read this series to find out on his or her own. The arch-enemy of humanity, 15,000-year-old Rasalom, plots away at a variety of other schemes meant to usher in the Age of the Otherness. Wilson's cosmic schemata is vaguely Lovecraftian -- two vast and impersonal forces vie for control of individual planets in the multiverse.

It all makes for a fast-paced, occasionally thoughtful read. Wilson's prose is adequate -- he's a plot-and-idea man first and foremost. Jack is, as usual, extremely competent; his allies are less so, to varying degrees. Recommended.