Reprisal
Author: F. Paul Wilson
Released: 1991
As I’m nearing the end of both the Adversary Cycle as well as the Repairman Jack series, both are currently suffering from trying to tie together a larger arc instead of telling a compelling individual story. The problem mainly stems from Rasolam, the villain figure who is just shy of all knowing and all powerful, but chooses to spend his time messing with a priest and a frumpy math teacher rather than working towards advancing his goals of turning the Earth into a haven for the forces of evil.
Reprisal is the 5th book in the Adversary Cycle, however it is just about a direct sequel to Reborn which told the story of a couple discovering that one of them was a clone and their fetus may be the anti-Christ. If you’ve read the Repairman Jack series before this, you know to be on the lookout for anagrams and fishy behavior, and Reprisal is no exception when it comes to finding the villain in the story.
Years after the events of Reborn, this book follows two main protagonists: Lisl is a math teacher who becomes involved in a torrid romance with a graduate student who begins to change her views on herself and other people. Will Ryerson is a maintenance man who has a secretive past, and spends his entire life trying to stay away from telephones. How do these two stories relate to a woman that gave birth to the embodiment of evil and a missing Jesuit priest who went by the name of Father Bill Ryan? I suspect without even reading the prequels, you can figure out who the good guy and who the bad guy are from this paragraph.
There’s also a third section of the novel that takes place as a flashback, explaining how Father Bill Ryan came to be on the run from law enforcement, and the investigation of a missing child led by a dedicated NYPD Detective. This was the most interesting portion of the book, dipping firmly into the supernatural horror genre. If you’re not a fan of bad things happening to kids in fiction, this is probably a book you should skip. Much like the events of Reborn however, the things that take place end up being so crazy that it’s hard to imagine somebody like Repairman Jack not being aware of them in his books later on.
By far the worst part about this book is the character of Lisl, a woman who makes every bad decision somebody can make with way too little resistance. I can even buy the revenge against her ex and jealousy towards a coworker, however the ease with which she dips into theft and reciting her boyfriend’s theories on Primes (exceptional people) being able to do whatever they want to other people made her a very difficult character to sympathize with.
The most interesting character in the book was another math teacher named Dr. Everett Saunders. I started off not knowing if he was a creepy psycho, a stalker, a person paralyzed by obsessive compulsive disorder or just a quirky colleague. The ultimate revelation of his secret wasn’t anything amazing, but it made him sympathetic and contributed to my vitriol towards Lisl. More interesting characters like this, instead of shoehorning Glaeken into an expository dumper role at the end would have improved this book, but as it stands this was not one of the better reads in the series. I’m finally ready for Nightworld to wrap up both series (except for the prequel novels that I’ll probably check out), and hopefully it will provide a satisfying conclusion to this sprawling series.
- 2 Barrels
- Repairman Jack
