31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"THE END OF LIFE AS WE KNOW IT"?, October 30, 2003
This review is from: Nightworld (Paperback)
Nightworld is a seriously scary book. Not personally scary but scary for the world as we know it. Nightworld completes the Nightworld series, which consists of six books, starting with The Keep. I've read all books and until the publication of Nightworld, it was called The Adversary Series, taken from the fact that the underlying element of this series is the ongoing confrontation through eternity and through the universe of two powerful forces.
These forces are not defined by good and evil for they are not. But one force, which is called the Other in the books, is brutal and caring nothing for humanity, tends to use evil means to achieve it's goal, while his adversary though not necessarily Good utilizes humanity to thwart His Adversary, The Other.
The Anti-Other, throughout history, has utilized a human champion to battle the Other. This champion is empowered with Godlike powers and made immortal for this purpose.
In the initial book, The Keep, which I've mentioned, the earthly agent of The Other, Rasalom, was weakened and imprisoned in a specially constructed prison by a champion of a long gone age, maybe a champion named Glaeken, whose subsequent job in The Keep was to keep tabs on The Other and make sure it didn't escape.
The Keep is a marvelous story wherein, Rasalom, because of some Nazi soldiers, almost escapes his incarceration. I won't go into the story but at the end, Rasalom is vanquished and ostensibly terminated but this is not to be and through the course of two more books, Reborn and Reprisal, Rasalom is rejuvenated, recuperated re-empowered and is set to take revenge upon troublesome humanity. The stage is set for Nightworld.
Nightworld
"If thou gaze into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee"
What in the world is going on! Sunrise was five plus minutes late! we're in early summer, surise should be later not earlier, and then another shocker, sunset was ten minutes early! This continues on the second day etc and then a bottomless hole 200 feet across and perfectly round opens up in New York's, Central Park.
The world's scientific community, though at a loss for these occurrences, downplay these episodes and insist there is a rational explanation for these phenomenons. However, there is one who knows what's going on and he has a birds eye view of the Central Park event from his apartment.
It is the ancient warrior Glaeken, who is now in his 80s (his immortality ended after his 1941 battle with Rasalom), living under a pseudonym, Mr. Veileur. Glaeken knows exactly what's going on and he immediately sets out to gather a group of individuals to try to effect some sort of resistance, admittedly an enormous longshot but the only shot humanity has.
Main Charactersin order of appearance
Rasalom [Evil agent of the Other]
Dr. Nicholas Guinn [Physicist and friend of Bill Ryan]
Glaeken/veileur [Aged champion of the Anti-Other]
(ex father) Bill Ryan [Friend and confidant of Glaeken]
Carol Teece [mother of the reborn Rasalom]
Repairman Jack [hero of "The Tomb", a resourceful replacement for the aged Glaeken]
Kolabati [an ancient Indian Priestess who has two artifacts Glaeken needs]
Ba Nyguen [a special forces trained Vietnamese body guard for the following]
Sylvia Nash [mother of the adopted boy Jeffery]
Dr Alan Bulmer [Sylvia's husabnd and Jeffery's father]
Jeffery [a boy who has a healing power called Dat-tay-vao which Glaekin needs in his battle]
Glaeken meets with his would be recruits and of course his story is met with some skepticism, however, as Glaeken predicts, on the second night, hoards of large flying killer insect like creatures(later named by Glaeken as Belly Flies and Chew Wasps descend on an unsuspecting population and kill hundreds of people, horses, dogs etc. Also thousands of these creatures make a beeline to the home of Jeffery and his parents, in an obvious effort to kill Jeffery.
These creatures and the even more deadly creatures that follow can't stand sunlight but of course, day by day, the sunlight is slowly disappearing. In addition thousands of new holes open up around the world and every effort to cap them has been futile, with additional casualties. Humanity is quickly being wiped out and the daylight is getting shorter and shorter!
Things indeed look bleak for humanity but at least the recent horrors have solidified our cadre. Repairman Jack, with Ba in tow is off to Maui and Bill Ryan is off to Rumania, all to retrieve the artifacts that Glaeken needs to have a chance to counteract the carnage.
Can Repairman Jack and Glaeken, along with his unlikely cadre save "life as we know it", or will Rasalom rule over an Unholy Nightmare World?
Author
If you've never read F.Paul Wilson, I recommend him heartily.
He has a nice easily readable writing style and he seems to always have unusual if not unique plots to his stories. This particular book is the culmination of a series that I'm sure did not start out as such. "The Keep" was the original book as I have mentioned and is the basis for the series and as mentioned "Reborn" and "Reprisal" were definitely created to make a series out of a single novel but the resourceful Wilson managed to tie two unrelated books "The Tomb" and "The Touch" into episodes in the series in this last book and it works very well for me.
I was also glad to see Wilson reprise the ever popular Repairman Jack. Wilson has gone on to write several more Repairman Jack novels.
Reviewers Note
Because of the nature of this story. this book tends to be fairly gory and graphic about it. If this is not your cup of tea, then do not read this book. Then again, what are you doing reading any horror books?
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Apocalyptic horror with fantasy undertones., June 25, 1999
By A Customer
In Nightworld, the sixth and final book in the Adversary Cycle, F. Paul Wilson achieves a beautiful climax to the millenia-old war between the champions of good and evil, Glaeken and Rasalom. As the days become progressively shorter because of a late-rising and early-setting sun, cries of armageddon resound around the globe. Then a 200-ft hole opens up in Central Park, each night out of which pour swarms of alien insects who devour anything and everything they can. As scientists futilely try to understand these phenomena and the world is plunged further into inescapable madness, one wizened old man must struggle to gather a group of unlikely heroes together for the final stand against the force behind the chaos--Rasalom, ancient champion of evil. In Nightworld, F. Paul Wilson manages to stitch together the previous books in the series(The Keep, The Tomb, The Touch, Reborn, and Reprisal), most of which seem to have been thought up on completely different drawing boards, into a skin-crawling page-turner. Although adding The Tomb and The Touch to the Adversary Cycle seems somewhat of an afterthought at times, when you finish Nightworld you will have nothing but fond (as well as freaky) memories of the series. I reccomend that you read the rest of the books in the series before you touch Nightworld, as it might otherwise make quite a bit less sense. Also, reading the previous books will help you develop more of an understanding of the characters, particularly Glaeken, Father Bill, and Repairman Jack. Also, if you like fantasy, the series hints several times about earth's distant past...
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