Hosts by F. Paul Wilson

 

(pb; 2001: fifth book in the Repairman Jack series)

 

From the back cover

“Hosts starts with a bang when Jack has to stop a psychotic shooting rampage on a subway car—but there are witnesses, and Jack’s essential anonymity is threatened.

“A good deal more is threatened when the lover of Jack’s sister Kate survives a brain tumor, thanks to an experimental treatment, only to join a strange cult called ‘The Unity.” Now Jack must face a new kind of enemy a virally based group mind that wants to take over him and the world.”

 

Review

Everything is dialed up to the highest volume in Wilson’s fifth Repairman Jack work, Hosts. While explicitly setting the stage for Jack’s crossover/return into the Adversary/Nightworld series in Nightworld (1992), Hosts introduces readers to Kate Iverson, Jack’s long-unseen sister, whose friend (Jeanette Vega) has joined a doomsday cult, one that might have its roots in Jack’s recent past—and Glenn/Glaeken/Mr. Veilleur's. (Glaeken/Veilleur appeared in Wilson’s The Keep, 1981, and Reprisal,1992.)

Jack and Veilleur/Glaeken aren’t the only familiar faces. Darkly humorous and weapons salesman Abe Grossman is also back, with others in the mix (e.g. arsonists Joe and Stan Kozlowski, minor villains in a previous Repairman Jack novel, I forget which one), getting thoroughly explored as fully fleshed characters, sometimes to Hosts’s detriment. Fans of Sal Roma/Rasalom/M Saralo—that latter name new for that evil force, first seen in The Keep—is not explicitly shown in Hosts but his works and influence overshadow everything in Jack’s world, something he’s starting to realize.

As with earlier Adversary/Nightworld/Repairman Jack books, Hosts is a wild ride but in blowing up everything to maximalist drama and supernatural/action-oriented fireworks, Wilson bloats it into overwriting, which works sometimes here, and at other times made me wish the novel was over already (especially near the end—still curious about who the old Russian lady, Jack’s “mother,” is though.

Hosts is still an excellent read despite Wilson’s penchant for overwriting. Not sure I’m going to read the next Repairman Jack novels, but I will likely cut to Nightworld, which is said to bring everything from the Adversary/Jack novels to the Adversary side of things. The Haunted Air (2002) is the next Repairman Jack novel.

Note for the possibly confused: Wilson wrote a lot of these novels out of chronological order.