The Dark at the End

The last page of “The Dark At The End”, the 15th and last novel of the Repairman Jack series ends, as it had to, as a rewrite of the prologue to “Nightworld”, first published in 1993, exactly as F.Paul Wilson has been telling us for years that it would.

TDATE is a worthy finale to the RJ series, tying together all RJ 15 novels, plus the 3 YA Jack books and various other bits and pieces of the Secret History of the World. It leaves no loose ends. Everyone and everything of principal importance from the entire series is present and most play important or crucial roles. Weezy, Eddie, Drexler, Dawn and the baby, Abe, Thompson, Gia and Vicky, Glaeken and Magda, the Lady, Julio’s (one brief mention) the Lodge, the Order, the sword, the pyramid, the Compendium of Srem, the Crown Vic, the whole megillah is here. FPW has somehow, incredibly managed to pull everything together and position pieces that are characters and artifacts from the Adversary Cycle and YA and adult RJ books onto the gigantic chessboard that will be played out in the “heavily revised” re-release of “Nightworld”, due in 2012. And he has concluded everything in a compact 336 pages. It really does seem as if FPW has had this gigantic complicated plot line in his head for something like 20 years, and has played each card deliberately and at all times with the end in mind. There are no coincidences.

TDATE is totally satisfying while at the same time igniting an urgent desire to re-read Nightworld. I intend to try to resist re-reading the original copy on my bookshelf for as along as possible, hopefully until the revised version appears, which I will pre-order as soon as possible. I am a little sad that this is it for RJ (except for 3 promised prequels – intermediaries between the YA Jack novels and his appearance in “The Tomb”), but it was a masterful end to a great series.

Highly recommended (but only after you have read the first 14 plus the first 5 books in the Adversary Cycle).

JM Tepper

So after reading the entire series folks, SPOILER ALERT HERE….this is NOT THE END….so I bought NIGHTWORLD which hopefully ENDS the series once and for all…..I actually felt a little cheated….I felt like he wants to hook you into a whole other series of books so that he has more sales…..so I wasn’t happy with that…..I read because I love reading and I have loved the Repairman series…..but every author needs to know when to end a story and start a new one.

“The Dark at the End” (DatE) serves as a bridge from Repairman Jack’s long running battle with the Otherness and its designated point-man, Rasalom, to the final chapter in Repairman Jack’s and the Adversary cycles.

Mr. Wilson does a very nice job of setting up the final battle, “Nightworld” (the new version is scheduled to be released in late Spring 2012).

This is a must read book for followers of the Repairman Jack and Adversary Cycle books, and it would be a fun read for someone reading the first book in the series. (There is so much back-story to the series by this point that Mr. Wilson has to make the DatE self referential.)

Spoilers follow.

In DatE, Jack starts to physically change as he prepares to take on Glaeken’s role as the protector of the Earth and the lead for the “Ally.”

We see several long-standing characters killed and destroyed from both the Otherness’ and the Ally’s side. Wheezy and her brother, the key enforcers for the Order, our young teenage mother (Dawn) from “Fatal Error” as well as Rasalom’s driver and housekeeper all pay the ultimate price for their involvement in the Secret History of the Earth.

The central plot in DatE revolves around how Rasalom is going to kill the Lady. The Lady (the collective consciousness of all of humanity) must be destroyed before the Otherness can take over the Earth. In previous books, she had been destroyed twice and severely weakened.

The Good Guys(tm) led by Jack, Glaeken, Wheezy, and the Lady are also trying to figure out ways of harming or limiting Rasalom.

They think that they may have found a way from the Book of Srem. The Book starts to oddly open to the same page every time, and the page it opens to is a naming ceremony that theoretically would cripple Rasalom’s powers.

The hunt for Rasalom’s True Name takes Wheezy and Jack back to their roots in New Jersey and the old Lodge there.

The Q’r’r child is discovered in Long Island, and Jack devises a plan to destroy Rasalom’s physical form using Stinger missiles, high explosive grenades, and improvised explosive devices.

Unfortunately, at a critical moment, the car that Wheezy was going to use is towed away, and Wheezy leaves Dawn alone.

Dawn makes a series of seven bad decisions that end up in her own death and the deaths of Rasalom’s driver and housekeeper.

This completely negates Jack’s plan. Jack improvises by booby-trapping Rasalom’s house.

In the ensuing battle, the entire house is destroyed, razed to the ground, and Rasalom escapes in a boat. Jack then launches a Stinger missile that hits and obliterates the boat, and …

Rasalom survives.

Then, Rasalom’s nefarious plot comes through to fruition. While the Lady is using the Naming Ceremony on the Q’r’r child (the child is on her lap), Rasalom freezes the rest of the occupants of the room and runs the child and the Lady through with the Gajin blade. This combination of “Otherness infused blood” and the blade “from outside the Earth” kills the Lady for the third and final time. The Ally will perceive the Earth as being non-sentient, and the Otherness (that is apparently much cleverer than the Ally) will take over the Earth that the Otherness knows contains sentient creatures to torture for all eternity.

The DatE was interesting and well-written, but there were a few inconsistencies that knocked the book from five to four stars for me.

(The inconsistencies are not enough to make the book a bad read, but they are sufficient to hurt suspension of disbelief.)

There is an old saying in fiction writing, impossible always, improbable never.

I’m fine with the impossible. Rasalom is immortal. There is mutant, alien, Otherness oDNA in mankind that can be bred into a super-oDNA creature in three generations. There is a book that contains infinite information in a finite number of pages. There used to be “little people” living on the Earth. Etc. All of that is fine and fun.

The following four points are about improbabilities that tried to derail a well done novel.

First, the Otherness has consistently been portrayed as more powerful than the Ally in all of the novels after “the Keep.” Why would Glaeken spawn an heir? Glaeken is aging, because the Ally has withdrawn. There is no evidence that the Ally has returned. Also, why didn’t the six other chosen of the Otherness spawn heirs? The whole heir plot thread doesn’t feel like it fits well within either the Adversary Cycle or the Repairman Jack books.

Second, Rasalom is much more clever than the Lady, and that does not make any sense. The Lady should have been able to figure out that the combination of the Gajin blade and the Q’r’r child could harm her. Both were brought up as potential sources of harm to her, and the Lady said that she could not imagine any way that they could have harmed her. The Lady should also have figured out that the Book of Srem was tampered with. She could tap into any knowledge that existed throughout the ages. She should have known that the Book suddenly always opening to the same page meant that something was “wrong” with the book.

Third, I don’t care how tough Rasalom is … if he is human (a fact repeated throughout the entire book) then having a house collapse around you from explosions would have done him in. The IED in the fridge should have concussed and stunned him just from the blast wave (given that Rasalom had his hand sheared off from the copper stream). [Turns out that I do things for a living that give me some insight into this.] Rasalom should have fallen to the floor, unconscious, and bled out from that. There has never been any evidence in any of the books that Rasalom is magically armored – he is quicker and heals faster, but Rasalom should still have been dead, dead, dead. Dare we even talk about the Stinger missile hitting his boat?

There is more, but let’s stop with four; the Ally is so over-matched in the DatE that the reader is left to ponder how it is remotely possible that the Otherness did not take over the cosmos millennium ago. The idea that the Otherness knows that a world has sentient creatures, but the Ally does not, seems very hard to accept at face value.

If the Ally even just used a simple spreadsheet to track the worlds, things would work out alright!

As stated at the beginning of the review, this is a must read book for the Adversary Cycle and Repairman Jack fan, but be ready to mash the “I believe” button through some of the improbable hoops that the plot jumps through.

In service,

Rich

It ain’t over ’til it’s over, but this book gets us to the “end” of the Repairman Jack series. The real end is in “Nightworld”, originally written by Wilson back in 1992, where Jack has a significant part in the downfall of the Otherness on Earth. Wilson has re-written/”heavily revised” “Nightworld” to reflect the changes he’s made in the RJ universe since 1993 (it’s out later this year); “Nightworld” was originally written before Wilson decided to continue the RJ series in 1998 (with “Legacies”). As I had read “Nightworld” when it first came out, I was expecting most of the events that occur in the last half of this book; if you haven’t read the original “Nightworld”, I recommend that you hold off. In “The Dark at the End,” Jack gets together with Glaeken, the Lady, and Weezy to find and kill Rasalom, with the finale providing the lead-in the the re-written “Nightworld”. Jack’s friend Abe outdoes himself with the selection of weaponry Jack uses, leading to several WTF moments. As such, this book wraps up all of the loose ends developed over the last four or so RJ novels, brings into play the events of Wilson’s YA “Circle” novels (about Jack’s youth), and serves as a good bridge into “Nightworld.” I so look forward to it.

I’ve read a good many books by this author and have always been impressed with his ability to instantly have the reader engaged with the tale.

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