Gateways (Repairman Jack Novels) [Mass Market Paperback]

F. Paul Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Series: Repairman Jack Novels | Publication Date: February 7, 2006

Following last year's successful The Haunted Air, F. Paul Wilson returns with another riveting episode in the saga of Repairman Jack, the secretive, ingenious, and heroic champion of those whose problems no one else can solve. As Dean Koontz says, "Repairman Jack is one of the most original and intriguing characters to arise out of contemporary fiction in ages. His adventures are hugely entertaining."

In Gateways, Jack learns that his father is in a coma after a car accident in Florida. They've been on the outs, but this is his dad, so he heads south. In the hospital he meets Anya, one of his father's neighbors. She's a weird old duck who seems to know an awful lot about his father, and even a lot about Jack.

Jack's arrival does not go unnoticed. A young woman named Semelee, who has strange talents and lives in an isolated area of the Everglades with a group of misshapen men, feels his presence. She senses that he's "special," like her.

Anya takes Jack back to Dad's senior community, Gateways South, which borders on the Everglades. Florida is going through an unusual drought. There's a ban on watering; everything is brown and wilting, but Anya's lawn is a deep green.
Who is Anya? Who is Semelee, and what is her connection to the recent strange deaths of Gateways residents-killed by birds, spiders, and snakes-during the past year? And what are the "lights" Jack keeps hearing about-? Lights that emanate twice a year from a sinkhole deep in the Everglades . . . lights from another place, another reality.

If he is to protect his father from becoming the next fatality at Gateways, there are questions Jack must answer, secrets he must uncover. Secrets . . . Jack has plenty of his own, and along the way he learns that even his father has secrets.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As in his last Repairman Jack novel, The Haunted Air (2002), Wilson deftly contrasts the self-imposed isolation of his vigilante hero with the forced exile of society's outcasts. When he learns that his estranged father is in a coma after a car accident, Jack travels to Florida, where his father has been living in a retirement community, Gateways South, which encroaches a bit further into the Everglades than the brochures would have you think. Jack soon has another run-in with what he calls "the Otherness," a Lovecraftian evil that here pervades a lagoon and the community of mutated rednecks surrounding it. Wilson is unsurpassed in depicting his characters' feelings of alienation as they attempt to comprehend the cosmic forces that have misshapen their lives. Particularly vivid is Semelee, an albino woman-child who achieves a certain degree of domination over her mostly male brethren by virtue (or lack thereof) of her sexuality. Jack's reconciliation with his father, along with the discovery that his father is also no stranger to the finer points of violence, could have been maudlin in the hands of a lesser writer, but Wilson provides just enough conflict between the two to allow their newfound love for each other to be convincing. This one will appeal to horror aficionados and to fans of Carl Hiassen and James Lee Burke.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

The new Repairman Jack novel finds our heroic fix-it man on a road trip to Florida, where his father has recently been in a near-fatal car accident. The trip itself is dangerous enough (in the post-9/11 world, it is tough for a man with no official identity and a weapon strapped to his arm to get onto an airplane), but that's nothing compared to the danger he'll encounter in the Everglades. As usual, Wilson intrudes on the action with various pronouncements--witness, for example, the scene in which Jack flicks through stations on a car radio, and we're treated to (presumably) the author's opinions on country music and Lou Reed--but this time the main story, involving a series of murders and some mysterious creatures in the swampy glades, more than makes up for the frequent editorial intrusions. Wilson continues to mix the traditional thriller with elements of the supernatural in ways--not quite horror but more than mystery--that appeal to both sides of the genre fence. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books (February 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765346052
• ISBN-13: 978-0765346056
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #199,208 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #45 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Horror > Occult

More About the Author

I was born toward the end of the Jurassic Period and raised in New Jersey where I misspent my youth playing with matches, poring over Uncle Scrooge and E.C. comics, reading Lovecraft, Matheson, Bradbury, and Heinlein, listening to Chuck Berry and Alan Freed, and watching Soupy Sales and horror movies. I sold my first story in the Cretaceous Period and have been writing ever since. (Even that dinosaur-killer asteroid couldn't stop me.)

I've written in just about every genre - science fiction, fantasy, horror, a children's Christmas book (with a monster, of course), medical thrillers, political thrillers, even a religious thriller (long before that DaVinci thing). So far I've got about 33 books and 100 or so short stories under my name in 24 languages.

THE KEEP, THE TOMB, HARBINGERS, and BY THE SWORD all appeared on the New York Times Bestsellers List. WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS won the first Prometheus Award in 1979; THE TOMB received the Porgie Award from The West Coast Review of Books. My novelette "Aftershock" received the 1999 Bram Stoker Award for short fiction. DYDEETOWN WORLD was on the young adult recommended reading lists of the American Library Association and the New York Public Library, among others (God knows why). I received the prestigious Inkpot Award from San Diego ComiCon and the Pioneer Award from the RT Booklovers Convention. I'm listed in the 50th anniversary edition of Who's Who in America. (That plus $3 will buy you a girly coffee at Starbuck's.)

My novel THE KEEP was made into a visually striking but otherwise incomprehensible movie (screenplay and direction by Michael Mann) from Paramount in 1983. My original teleplay "Glim-Glim" first aired on Monsters. An adaptation of my short story "Menage a Trois" was part of the pilot for The Hunger series that debuted on Showtime in July 1997.

And then there's the epic saga of the Repairman Jack film. After 14 years in development hell with half a dozen writers and at least a dozen scripts, THE TOMB is finally moving toward production as "Repairman Jack" from Beacon Films and Touchstone. The plan is to make Jack a franchise character. (Gotta tell you: all the years of this has worn me out.)

I've done a few collaborations too. One with Steve Spruill on NIGHTKILL, and a bunch with Matthew J. Costello. Matt and I did world design, characters, and story arcs for Sci-Fi Channel's FTL NewsFeed, a daily newscast set 150 years in the future. An FTL NewsFeed was the first program broadcast by the new channel when it launched in September 1992. We took over scripting the Newsfeeds (the equivalent of a 4-1/2 hour movie per year) in 1994 and continued until its cancellation in December 1996.

We did script and design for MATHQUEST WITH ALADDIN (Disney Interactive - 1997) with voices by Robin Williams and Jonathan Winters, and the same for The Interactive DARK HALF for Orion Pictures, based on the Stephen King novel, but this project was orphaned when MGM bought Orion. (It's officially vaporware now.) We even wrote a stageplay, "Syzygy," which opened in St. Augustine, Florida, in March, 2000.

I'm tired of talking about myself, so I'll close by saying that I live and work at the Jersey Shore where I'm usually pounding away on a new Repairman Jack novel and haunting eBay for strange clocks and Daddy Warbucks memorabilia. (No, we don't have a cat.)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Back in Action!, July 1, 2003

By 

J. A. KONRATH "Thriller Author" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gateways (Hardcover)

F. Paul Wilson's iconic hero-without-a-history, Repairman Jack, is back for his seventh, and possibly finest, adventure.

News of an accident involving his estranged father sends the self-styled Mr. Fix-it to a creepy retirement community in Florida, where longevity is a theory, not a practice.

If the culture shock isn't hard enough for NY's native son, a string of unsolved murders and some very creepy locals alert Jack to the fact that the supernatural Otherness, which has been plaguing him since Wilson's THE TOMB, is back for another helping.

With enough action, firepower, one-liners, and wicked monsters for a a dozen novels, GATEWAYS showcases F. Paul Wilson and Jack in top form-- kicking bum and taking names.

See for yourself why Repairman Jack is the greatest series hero in modern genre fiction!

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Repairman Jack Since The Tomb?, February 24, 2004

By 

Mr D. "Artist/Designer/Kibitzer" (Cave Creek, Az United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gateways (Hardcover)

I once read a series of six books by Wilson, called the Adversary Series. It started out with The Keep and ended with an out of print, rare book called Nightworld. Nightworld was an extraordinary book wherein the evil, reborn Rasalom, after a titanic seemingly unwinable battle and against all odds, was vanquished for once and for all, or was he?

With Gateways, it seems our illustrious author is leading us back to another cataclysmic clash with this maleficent character, a reprise of sorts or maybe even a reissue of Nightworld, in which Repairman Jack played a significant part. That would explain why Jack seems to have no recollection of major events that happened in a novel written ten years ago. I suppose we will have to wait and see what Wilson has in mind, so let's get to the story at hand.

Background on Repairman Jack

This is the seventh book involving, the very popular fictional character, Repairman Jack, a character that has become one of the most beloved literary creations since James Bond.

Repairman Jack is an unobtrusive looking guy who has slipped in under the government radar. He doesn't exist as far as the government knows. He has no social security number, no credit cards, pays no taxes, pays cash for everything always keeps a low profile.

Jack "The Equalizer". If you remember the TV show of that name from several years ago, that is what Jack does. No he's not "The Equalizer" but if you've been wronged and you've got the money, Jacks available and Jack can be deadly. He can be your worst nightmare but as nightmares go everything is relative and Jack takes second fiddle in this book as he fights for his and his father's life

Plot

Jack's seventy year old father, was involved in a hit and run accident and is comatose in the hospital. Jack flies down to be with him and as well as to nose around to see if he can find out what happened.

Well the more he finds out, the stranger things get, as Jack seems to have gotten himself involved in yet another supernatural incident involving a young woman who can control animals and older woman with somewhat magical powers.

When Jack finally gets to his fathers hospital room he runs into his father's neighbor, the enigmatic Anya, a mysterious seventy-something lady of surprises. She insists that Jack stay in his dad's house so they in effect are neighbors as well. While there Jack discovers that Anya is indeed more than meets the eye.

As Jack tries to investigate, his fathers accident many things don't add up, such as the anonymous call about the accident preceding the accident by twenty minutes. He also discovers there have been three unnatural deaths among Gateways residents about three months apart and Jacks dad may fit that pattern.

Eventually Jack runs into a white haired girl named Semelee, the defacto leader of a strange group of misshapen young adults called the Clan, that live in the Everglades. Semelee seems to have some advanced knowledge of Jack and also seems to be smitten with Jack, much to the chagrin of Luke, Semelee's wannabe boyfriend.

The next day Jack runs into a gardener named Carl who has a lazy eye and apparently no left arm. He later discovers that Carl used to be a member of the deformed group and gets him to lead Jack to the clan's secret lagoon.

After a couple days in Florida, with the ostensible help of Anya, Jack's father comes out of the coma and that's when things get really interesting.

Conclusion

This is a fun read. A fast moving story of about 370 pages, it may be the most interesting of the Repairman Jack novels since he debuted with the Tomb. The writing is fluid and compelling and we finally get to meet Tom, Repairman Jack's father who is quite a guy himself. You remember him, he's the guy in previous novels that thought Jack repaired appliances.

And don't go away folks. The way the book ends is definitely setting up at least one sequel and when it comes to Repairman Jack, that's good news!

Final rating 4.6 stars

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Repairman Jack, July 14, 2004

By 

Andrew Phillips (Pocatello, ID United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gateways (Hardcover)

I have to agree with Kathleen Griffin's note that you should first read "The Barrens." It lends appreciation to this Repairman Jack piece.

Jack heads down to Florida after his father is involved in an auto-accident. There are no more coincidences for Jack, of course, and he finds more going on with his dad than he would ever have expected.

The repairs in Gateways are personal and not as layered as those in The Haunted Air or Hosts (for example), but the personal information on Jack's life and the much-needed reconnection with his father make this a more-than-worthwhile read. And, afterall, it is Repairman Jack, and F. Paul Wilson doesn't disappoint here. It'll keep you going from start to finish.