Horrors Quiet, Horrors Loud

The Thief of Broken Toys (2011) by Tim Lebbon: This lovely, lonely, haunting short novel is a thing of disturbing beauty from Tim Lebbon. There's a Ray Bradbury quality to some of the story elements (especially that eponymous being). But it's the leaner Bradbury of the 1940's, the one capable of horror. 

The loss of a son to an undiagnosed genetic disorder has left the novel's protagonist, the boy's father, in an emotional purgatory as The Thief of Broken Toys begins. His wife struggles to move on -- in part by having left him. He stays at home, for the most part, where he's been for the most part of a year. And then, on one of his nightly walks on the English sea coast, he encounters the eponymous being -- an old man who offers him the ability to heal. Beware strangers bearing supernatural gifts, no matter how seemingly benign!

I don't know that all of the elements work. The occasionally intruding narration speaks to larger things outside the events of the novel, but it never entirely convinced me, or at least convinced me that it was necessary to the tragedy and horror of the story itself. Nonetheless, this is stellar work from Lebbon. 

Technically this is 'quiet horror,' but it's horror nonetheless. And the final catastrophe horrifies without any blood being spilled or tentacled monster making an appearance. Actually, a tentacled monster would probably have been comforting. Highly recommended.

The Keep (1981) by F. Paul Wilson: F. Paul Wilson's first 'big' novel is also his best. A dreadful movie adaptation in the mid-1980's, directed by Michael Mann, got pretty much everything wrong about Wilson's original. The Keep is a clever synthesis of vampire novel, cosmic horror, and high fantasy, though that last bit doesn't become evident until the last 50 pages or so. Its best horror moments come in its first half, while the full nature of the adversary remains hidden from reader and characters alike.

The Keep would soon be folded into Wilson's 'Adversary Cycle,' a six-novel arc that is itself part of a much larger body of work dubbed 'The Secret History of the World' that includes Wilson's multi-volume Repairman Jack series. My version of The Keep ends without any sort of cliffhanger or 'stinger' ending, but this may not be true of later editions of the novel. Wilson rewrote a number of novels to eradicate inconsistencies within both the Cycle and the Secret History.

The genius of The Keep lies in its use of the Nazis as foils to the greater evil growing inside the Keep. It's 1941. Much of the action occurs in an isolated part of Romania where German infantry have been entrusted with taking control of that mysterious Keep. The name itself is a misnomer -- there was never a castle surrounding the structure, and the name was simply attached as a matter of convenience. Why are there unusually designed crosses embedded in the walls of the Keep? Why does anyone who tries to sleep there awake from nightmares of confinement? Who's been paying to maintain the Keep with a long line of well-recompensed villagers from an adjacent village for the last 500 years? And why has the German Army Captain in charge of the Keep telegrammed High Command to ask for help because "something is killing my men"?

Well, there's the novel. Wilson's strongest character work involves the fraught relationship between the German Army Captain and the SS Major sent to deal with the problem. The Captain hates the Nazis, but he's also a loyal soldier. The SS Major is a coward and a sadist who dreams of the money to be made once he takes control of Nazi preparations in Ploesti for the coming Romanian Holocaust. As problems at the Keep continue despite the SS presence, they agree to summon a Romanian-Jewish scholar who's the world's only known authority on the Keep. As the scholar has been crippled by a wasting disease, along with him comes his bright, unmarried daughter.

Props where props are due: that daughter makes for an interesting and unusual character in a horror novel written by a young man in the late 1970's and early 1980's. She becomes the focus of the third-person narrative, and Wilson makes her a compelling figure who wants a life of intellectual achievement in a world where both her gender and her ethnicity stand against any such achievement. While this character is put in jeopardy on numerous occasions, Wilson never makes her a stereotypical female victim. By the climax of the novel, she's one of the two most important characters in terms of opposing the ancient dark force inside the Keep.

As noted, the strongest moments of horror come in the first half, as a mysterious, unseen force stalks the Keep. But the revelation of the horror doesn't immediately deflate the narrative of its mystery: the creature explains what it is, but there are odd gaps and curiosities in its story. And the discovery of a cache of Lovecraftian banned texts points the way towards an explanation that has nothing to do with vampires or werewolves or ghosts. And they are literally Lovecraftian texts, the Necronomicon and a number of other fictional 'banned' books mentioned by H.P. Lovecraft and his fellow Cthulhuists over the years in a nod by Wilson to his American horror forerunners.

Once the novel passes that midway point, elements of a more conventional thriller begin to blend with elements of both dark and high fantasy. There are even riffs on the sort of material made popular by The Lord of the Rings and Robert E. Howard's Conan series. But Wilson also keeps things rooted in the historical setting of 1941 Eastern Europe, with the seemingly unstoppable Nazis about to embark on their betrayal of the Soviet Union. It's a relatively long novel, but it's briskly told in Wilson's competent, unflashy prose.  To nod to an old chestnut, if you read one novel by F. Paul Wilson, it should be this one. Highly recommended.

Infernal (2005) and Harbingers (2006) by F. Paul Wilson

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.

All the Rage (2000) and Hosts (2001) by F. Paul Wilson

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.

Conspiracies (2000) by F. Paul Wilson

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.

100 Years of H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft's Legacy: edited by Robert E. Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg, (1990) containing the following stories:

• A Secret of the Heart by Mort Castle: Solid tale written in a convincing homage to 19th-century diction, with a tip of the cap to all those ancient white-male antagonists in Lovecraft's stories.
• The Other Man by Ray Garton: Garton combines something Lovecraft didn't really deal with (romantic relationships) with a suitably surreal and sinister voyage through the Dreamlands.
• Will by Graham Masterton: Terrific piece of history-based Lovecraftiana featuring shenanigans in England during the Renaissance.
• Big "C" by Brian Lumley: Fun, too long, slight. The ending seems to be telegraphed from about the second page of the story.
• Ugly by Gary Brandner: A Lovecraftian object figures in another story of a (non-Lovecraftian) romantic relationship gone wrong.
• The Blade and the Claw by Hugh B. Cave: Interesting voodoo tale from the venerable Cave would seem more at home in a tribute to Frank Belknap Long due to its subject matter (and Long's classic short story "Second Night Out", aka "The Dead, Black Thing."
• Soul Keeper by Joseph A. Citro: A nod to the New England landscape and the sort of weirdos hiding in it that often showed up in Lovecraft stories that include "The Shunned House" and many others.
• From the Papers of Helmut Hecker by Chet Williamson: Delightful comic romp takes shots at a few modern writers.
• Meryphillia by Brian McNaughton: Pitch-perfect riff on Lovecraft's ghouls from his 'Dream Cycle' period.
• Lord of the Land by Gene Wolfe: Haunting, disturbing tale of cosmic horror and Egyptian mythology in the American heartland.
• H.P.L. by Gahan Wilson: Out-and-out comedy reads almost like a sitcom pilot for a really weird show about Lovecraft and friends/fiends.
• The Order of Things Unknown by Ed Gorman: Tenuously Lovecraftian but still enjoyable and terse.
• The Barrens by F. Paul Wilson: Absolutely top-level novella by the prolific Wilson combines very specific period- and regional detail about New Jersey's Pine Barrens with the sort of quasi-documentary search seen in many of Lovecraft's stories, and a fascinating extrapolation of regional ghost stories into a basis for cosmic horror.

A very solid anthology celebrating the 100th anniversary of H.P. Lovecraft's birth in 1990, this one, like most HPL-related volumes, remains in print today. There really isn't a bad story in the bunch, though a few seem very weakly related to Lovecraft's work. This possesses the most weirdly jaunty cover to a Lovecraft-related volume I've seen in a long time, because of colour choices and not subject matter. Also includes a useful, poignant introduction from Lovecraft's friend Robert (Psycho, Star Trek's Jack the Ripper episode) Bloch, and similarly useful and enjoyable afterwords by the assorted authors. Recommended.

Last Whispers

Whispers VI: edited by Stuart David Schiff (1987) containing the following stories:

The Bones Wizard by Alan Ryan: Supernatural musical shenanigans. Extremely subtle to the point of attenuation, with little actual horror.

Leaks by Steve Rasnic Tem: Quintessential Tem: mysterious, disturbing, rooted in the real.

Everything to Live For by Charles L. Grant: Almost a Philip K. Dick science-fiction horror story both in execution and in its treatment of its themes.

Bogy by Al Sarrantonio: Poetic, Bradburyesque piece with the sort of nasty ending that Bradbury specialized in back in the 1940's.

The Fool by David Drake: Lengthy novella echoes the regional dialects and themes of Drake's friend, horror legend Manly Wade Wellman, but with its own peculiar spin on magic and justice. Really a good, convincingly regional piece, and quite different from much of Drake's other output.

Repossession by David Campton: Enjoyable ghost story with a couple of interesting concepts. Would probably work better if it developed the narrator more.

The Years the Music Died by F. Paul Wilson: Bleakly humourous conspiracy tale about Rock-and-Roll.

The Woman in Black by Dennis Etchison: Typically elusive Etchison tale of mysterious horrors in the suburbs turns into an almost surreal freak-out at the end. This is not an ending you will see coming. Disturbing.

My Name Is Dolly by William F. Nolan: Concise, ably narrated in the first-person by a child, straddles psychological and supernatural horror.

Toad, Singular by Juleen Brantingham: Well-written but intensely unpleasant story in what I generally find to be an unrewarding sub-sub-genre of horror: the tale of a sympathetic nebbish who's been brutalized by the normal world...and now gets further brutalized by the supernatural! It all feels awfully sadistic.

Sleeping Booty by Richard Wilson: Droll short-short: black comedy, not horror.

Privacy Rights by J. N. Williamson: Really disturbing bit involving rape and abortion. Verges on the exploitative, and the madness of the main character doesn't seem fully earned by the story.

One for the Horrors by David J. Schow: Great, nostalgic piece about old movies and lonely people. Not horror.

The Black Clay Boy by Lucius Shepard: Super-duper creepy tale of sex, death, magic, and what I'd describe as Hagar Shipley goes to Hell.

Where Did She Wander? by Manly Wade Wellman: The last John the Balladeer story by the then-recently-deceased Wellman. Lovely and somewhat mournful.

In all: highly 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.

Secrets and Histories

Novels:

Ground Zero: A Repairman Jack Novel by F. Paul Wilson (2009): I've somehow avoided reading F. Paul Wilson novels until recently, perhaps because the film version of his novel The Keep was so traumatically bad that I subconsciously avoided Wilson's longer works. The Repairmen Jack novels tie into Wilson's Secret History of the World cycle of novels and stories, the major events of which are part of the Adversary Cycle, of which The Keep is one novel. The climax to these series has already been written (Nightworld), but will apparently be rewritten and re-released once the last two Jack novels appear in the near future.

The interlocking cycles cannily play with conspiracy stories, Lovecraftian alien 'gods' and lost civilizations. Repairman Jack -- Jersey born and bred, Manhattan residing -- is a knight errant 'fixer' of people's problems who finds himself drawn increasingly into the secret, universal war between The Ally and the invading Otherness. The Adversary -- Rasalom by name -- is a millennia-old servant of the Otherness, working tirelessly to bring about the corruption of the Earth, opposed throughout history by various champions.

Ground Zero pulls the events of 9/11 and the Truther movement into the massive, pan-historical conspiracy that underpins the Jack and Adversary stories. For a late novel in a lengthy series, it's extremely reader-friendly -- I was able to jump onboard without much effort, and the suspense and horror of the novel (along with its fascinatingly wonky explanation for 9/11) make we want to read more of Wilson's novels. Highly recommended.



Scavenger by David Morrell (2007): Morrell's emotionally wounded hero Balenger, from the earlier thriller Creepers, returns here in a fast-paced, thoughtful novel involving some truly interesting and odd facts about time capsules and video games. One might think that a thriller that uses the history of time capsules as a major plot element would be a tad boring, but Scavenger is anything but. One of Morrell's greatest strengths as a writer is his ability to make 'real-world' information a fascinating part of his thrillers.

Here, the history of time capsules made me want to know more about such ambitious projects as The Crypt of Civilization. Even better, time capsules work really well when tied into the video-game elements of the novel: a criminal mastermind sets several people on the trail of a lost thing known as the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires, a hidden memorial from the end of the 19th century that may explain how the residents of a mining town in the Rockies simply disappeared one winter, leaving no clue as to their whereabouts.

The hunt for a hidden item is a key element in many video games, as are the sort of trials and tests that await the various characters. The mastermind himself also has aspects of the traditional Dungeon Master figure of Dungeons and Dragons. Of course, these plot elements would be irrelevant if Morrell weren't capable of creating sympathetic, believable characters. He does that, while also supplying a 'set-piece' climax that combines horror with suspense. Highly recommended.