Reprisal by F. Paul Wilson

 

(pb; 1992: fifth book in the Nightworld Cycle, aka Adversary Cycle.)

 

From the back cover

“In The Keep, a squad of Nazi soldiers unleashed a terrible life force far more monstrous than the Third Reich.

“In Reborn, a human embryo struck fear in the hearts of the chosen few who could feel its power from the womb.

“Now, in Reprisal, bestselling author F. Paul Wilson resurrects the ancient, vampiric evil in a young man born of flesh and blood. A young southern college student named Rafe hides his true and secret identity. But soon the whole world will know. All of humankind will suffer. And Rafe will feed, forever, on their tears and pain.”

 

Review

Reprisal is a relatively straightforward (with a few big twists, fewer than usual) read. A good number of its characters, e.g., former Jesuit priest Will Ryan, now going under the name Will Ryerson, are returnees from Reborn, and two of them—Mr. Veilleur, aka Glaeken and Glenn; Rasalom, aka Molasar—appeared in the first Nightworld Cycle novel, The Keep.

But things are different now for them. Veilleur/Glaeken is a septuagenarian man, whose wife (Magda, from Keep) now has Alzheimer’s. Rasalom, who’s gone through a few incarnations, is now Rafe Losmara, a collegiate edgelord-type who’s in tune with his dark, murky-world powers—powers he means to unleash upon the world in full, once he’s accomplished his current mission, something that has to do with Ryan/Ryerson and those around him.

An easy-to-gauge-its-“secrets” novel, Reprisal is a fun-blast offset from some of Wilson’s more ambitious works. I enjoyed it for its almost B-movie-simple plot, its tight editing, and straightforward pushing-toward-a-Rasalom-Glaeken-climax writing.

One of my favorite Wilson books, this. It’s not a wrap-up—it has a semi-cliffhanger-ish finish—but it’s a satisfying and hard-to-set-down bringing together of familiar characters worth rooting for or loathing. Followed by Signalz.

Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin

 

(pb; 2025)

 

From the back cover

“A cursed film. A haunted past. A deadly secret.

“The Baroness, an infamous [1935] exploitation film long thought destroyed by Nazi fire, is discovered fifty years later. When lonely archivist Ellen Kramer―deeply closeted and pathologically repressed―begins restoring the hedonistic movie, it unspools dark desires from deep within her.

“As Ellen is consumed by visions and voices, she becomes convinced the movie is real and is happening to her―and that frame by frame, she is unleashing its occult horrors on the world. Her life quickly begins to spiral out of control.

“Until it all fades to black, and all that remains is a voice asking a question Ellen can’t answer but can’t get out of her mind: Do you want it? More than anything?”

 

Review

Set in New York (Staten island, Brooklyn), New Jersey (Clifton) and Delaware (Dover) in 1983, this only-for-die-hard/gorehound and LGBTQ+ friendly readers is a fiercely feminist, button-pushing read that slips seamlessly between Ellen Kramer’s nightmares and reality, rife with antisemitism, body horror, rape and sexism, bringing to me (at least for this reader) Poppy Z. Brite’s (aka Billy Martin) 1996 queer- and body horror-centric Exquisite Corpse as well as Clive Barker’s early to mid-career works.

Making Black even more horror-giddy, truly-cinematic fun is Felker-Martin’s love of film—explicit, fond mentions of Alien (1979), Halloween (1978), director/screenwriter David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Ira Levin’s 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby. Black’s finish brings to mind the following films: Demons (1985), Knife + Heart (2018), The Lords of Salem (2012) and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009). Real-life piece-of-fecal-matter Sen. Strom Thurman and a delightful Rodney Dangerfield (he’s filming Easy Money) make an appearance in this nunsploitation-flirtatious and tightly written, ambitious work, one worth owning.

Columbus: His Enterprise--Exploding the Myth by Hans Koning

 

(pb; 1976, 1991: nonfiction)

From the back cover

“Most of us been taught to think of Christopher Columbus as a single-minded, courageous visionary whose navigational skills led him to ‘discover’ the Americas. In this . .  revisionist biography accessible to people of all ages, Koning gives us the true history of Columbus’s life and voyages.

 

“Koning describes how Columbus’s consuming drive to send ‘mountains of gold’ back to Spain shaped his life, beginning the story with his childhood in Genoa and ending after his return from his fourth and final voyage, an old man in disgrace. He shows how Columbus’s ‘discovery’ led to the enrichment of the conquerors through the plunder and murder of the native peoples of the Americas.

“In an afterword for teachers, Bill Bigelow—a high school social studies teacher and the author of several curricula—shows how the book can be imaginatively used in the classroom to teach students to read history skeptically.”

 

Review

The “From the back cover” description pretty much sums up what I’d write as a review for this compelling, disturbing, necessary, cut-to-it and more honest portrayal of Columbus and the world he inhabited and exploited. It’s a simply stated, stunning and smart nonfiction book that I will keep—I usually give away or sell books when I’m done reading them—and plan to read again, sometime in the distant future. Worth owning, and one of my favorite reads of 2025.

S by Koji Suzuki

 

(pb; 2012 – English translation release: 2017: fifth book in the Ring Cycle. Translated from Japanese to English by Greg Gencorello.)

 

From the back cover

“Takanori Ando, son of Spiral protagonist Mitsuo, works at a small CGI production company and hopes to become a filmmaker one day despite coming from a family of doctors. When he’s tasked by his boss to examine a putatively live-streamed video of a suicide that’s been floating around the internet, the aspiring director takes on more than he bargained for. His lover Akane, an orphan who grew up at a foster-care facility and is now a rookie high-school teacher, ends up watching the clip. She is pregnant, and she is. . . triggered.

“Sinking hooks into our unconscious from its very first pages with its creepy imagery and rewarding curious fans of the series with clever self-references, here is a fitting sequel renown for its ongoing mutations.”

 

 

Review

S, whose storyline plays out, template-wise, like that of Ring, is truly a “mutation” (Suzuki’s word) of its source novel. This time, though, it’s not Sadako—at least not directly—whose will births a variable and updated cycle of strange deaths (in this case “suicides”). Eerie and compelling (again) like Ring, S ably mixes science fiction and horror as well, imbuing its reader-resonant vibe with a sense of societal sin(s) and history. This is a great read, worthy to be called a sequel to the landmark Ring. Followed by Tide (2013).

Conspiracies by F. Paul Wilson

 

(pb; 2000: third book in the Repairman Jack series)

 

From the back cover

“Repairman Jack, F. Paul Wilson’s vigilante hero from 1984’s The Tomb and 1998’s Legacies returns in a thriller that thrusts Jack back into the weird, supernatural world that he thrives in. Looking for clues to the mysterious disappearance of leading conspiracy theorist Melanie Ehler. Jack attends a convention of bizarre and avid conspiracy theorists. It is a place where aliens are real, the government is out to get you, and the world is hurtling toward an inevitable war of good versus evil incarnate. Jack finds that nobody can be trusted—and that few people are what they seem. Worse yet, Jack’s been having vivid dreams that make him wonder whether he’s headed for a clash with his own past—maybe The Tomb’s evil rakoshi beasts are through with him quite yet.”

Review

Conspiracies takes place almost immediately after the events of Legacies, with Jack searching for a missing woman (Melanie Ehler) at an unusual conspiracy theories convention where danger, human-based and supranatural, threatens its attendees. Then there’s the nightmares—not just Jack’s, which center around the terrifying and fierce rakoshi, whom he thought he’d vanquished in The Tomb, leading Jack and others to wonder: why are its other attendees having nighttime terror visions as well?

 

Stephen King fans may especially enjoy Wilson’s vivid, cinematic writing (with its affectionate and pulpy-at-time descriptions of New York) as well as Conspiracies’s often suspenseful multicharacter B-storylines and neo-noir/conspiracy thriller elements. Conspiracies, lots of humor and Lovecraftian fear dominate Wilson’s prose and characters as they try to make it without losing their minds—and their lives.

 

Conspiracies, which runs long at times, expands on the characters, storylines and Wilson’s “secret history of the world” (which unifies his published work), while setting up future vigilante action and (possible) villains in later Repairman Jack books, the next one All the Rage.

Sugar on the Bones by Joe R. Lansdale

 

(pb; 2024: thirteenth novel in the Hap and Leonard series)

 

From the back cover

“Minnie Polson is dead. Burned to a crisp in a fire so big and bad it had to be deliberate. The only thing worse is that Hap and Leonard could have prevented it. Maybe. Minnie had a feeling she was being targeted, shaken down by some shadowy force. However, when she’d solicited Hap & Leonard, all it took was one off color joke to turn her sour and she’d called them off the investigation. Wracked with a guilty conscience, the two PIs—along with Hap’s fleet-footed wife, Brett—tuck in to the case. As they look closer, they dredge up troublesome facts: for one, Minnie’s daughter, Alice, has recently vanished. She’d been hard up after her pet grooming business went under and was in line to collect a whopping insurance sum should anything happen to her mother. The same was due to Minnie’s estranged husband, Al, whose kryptonite (beautiful, money-grubbing women) had left him with only a run-down mobile home. But did Minnie’s foolish, cash-strapped family really have it in them to commit a crime this grisly? Or is there a larger, far more sinister scheme at work?”

 

 

Review

Sugar, Lansdale’s follow-up to the last Hap and Leonard [H&P] novel, The Elephant of Surprise (2019), finds the longtime friends, along with Brett (Hap’s wife) investigating a suspicious arson-murder case, with (possible) help from friends (or frenemies) from past H&P novels and stories. These characters include: Jim Bob, Vanilla Ride, Veil and Kung Fu Bobby.

Reading a H&P story is like visiting old friends—they’re raw, sometimes salty and scary, but always interesting and sincere in their intentions, and Sugar is no exception. There’s plenty of quip-quotable dialogue, raw action, hissable villains, fully realized and often warm frenemies/friend, though this time out it feels like it “H&P and friends” reunion, with a few new characters. It’s also, like other books in this series, a burn-through read, tonally falling somewhere between darker and recent lighter H&P fare. If the last third ran a bit long for me, it might be because I listened to this an audiobook and wasn’t doing my usual series-beat-familiar fast/physical book read. Worth owning, this, as are other H&P works, book- and television-wise. Followed, in book form, by Hatchet Girls.

Conan the Barbarian: Marvel Treasury Edition #4 by various artists and authors

 

(oversized pb; 1975: Marvel Comics graphic novel. Based on two of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories: “Rogues in the House,” originally published in January 1934, and “Red Nails,” originally published in July-October 1933. . . This oversized graphic novel is a collected reprint of several Marvel Comic comic book issues: Conan the Barbarian #11 [1971: “Rogues in the House”] and Savage Tales #2 and 3 [October and December 1973: “Red Nails”].)

 

Review, story by story

“Rogues in the House”: Betrayed by one of his many women (Jenna) after he “revenged” himself on “that priest of Anu,” Conan finds himself chained in a dungeon. An opportunity presents itself in the form of Murilo, a nobleman who offers to free Conan in exchange for the Cimmerian’s services as an assassin. Murilo’s stated target: Nabonidus, “red priest” and “master” of the unspecified city they’re in.

Conan accepts the offer, unaware that his liberator (Murilo) also has snuck into Nabonidus’s castle to make sure the targeted “man of science” meets a violent end—a mission further soured with a just-discovered horrific twist: Nabonidus is also a “wereman,” a giant ape creature calling itself Thak. Conan and Murilo immediately decide it’s best to flee the castle, as dealings with the supernatural rarely result in a survivable, positive outcome, something Conan knows all too well. They quickly find out escape is not an option for them.

Further twists in this illustrated tale make themselves known, making this fun, tightly penned and fast frame-paced comic, based on Robert E. Howard’s tale of the same name, originally published in Weird Tales magazine, January 1934.

Fans of Howard’s oeuvre might especially appreciate “Rogues”’s explicit reference to another Howard-penned Conan story, “The Tower of the Elephant,” originally published in Weird Tales in March 1933.

The artwork, perhaps because it was blown up for the oversized edition, has linework that is hazy, not solidly defined as well as slightly washed-out colors. This is not a complaint; I note this so readers of The Savage Sword of Conan magazine, which sports stellar, highly defined black and white artwork, don’t compare Savage to this more mainstream, less adult Marvel Treasury version.

 

“Red Nails [henceforth referred to as “Red”]”: Conan, trying to get into the loin cloth of a loath “Aquilonian she-pirate” (Valeria) he met in Sukmet, stalks her—he’s beguiled by her sword skills as much as he is by her wild beauty.

Just as she becomes aware of Conan’s creepy attentions, they sight a walled city in a barren plain. About the same time, Conan and Valeria fend off a horse-eating “dragon” (which looks like an uncommonly aggressive stegosaurus), compelling them to enter the mysterious, fortress-like city.

Upon entering the city-fort, Conan and Valeria encounter complicated dangers: they get caught in an intrametropolitan conflict between two feuding factions: the superstitious Xuchotl and the magick-wielding Xotalancs, whose long-term, internecine warfare is rooted in a broken brotherhood (Tecuhltli and Xotalanc’s), further betrayals and a seemingly ageless “witch,” Tascela.

“Red” is one of Howard’s most ambitious and character-complex Conan stories, even with its basic Hatfield/McCoys feud structure. Its original, print 1933 version, while impressive in intention, felt “weak. . . part of the reason for its disappointing delivery is because of its extended length—it’s a novelette, not a short story” (so I thought on 8/23/11, in my review of the print/story collection, Red Nails).

This Marvel Treasury Edition comic book version trims “Red”’s print-only excessive verbiage and length to its core, between its storytelling (if line-hazy and color faded) artwork and concise descriptions and dialogue. This makes the Marvel version of “Red” a better, more fun read, one that makes me appreciate Howard’s expansion of Conan’s world, along with his more fully realized characters, namely Valeria, whom even Conan recognizes as more than a beddable conquest by tale’s upbeat end.

(Valeria appears in director/co-screenwriter John Milius’s 1982 classic, Conan the Barbarian. Sandahl Bergman played the fierce “Aquilonian she-pirate.”)

This is a good, worth-owning read if you’re a Conan and/or early-1970s comic book fan.

“Red Nails” originally appeared in Weird Tales (July – October 1933, published in three serial parts).