Nightworld [Hardcover]

F. Paul Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1992

When the laws of nature become obscenely twisted by an evil entity and its unearthly, horrifying creatures, only Glaeken, the former immortal, and a small band of unlikely heroes stand between the world and the utter triumph of unspeakable darkness.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Satan returns to devour the earth and its inhabitants in this strong sequel to Reborn and Reprisal. Rasalom (as the devil is known here) has shortened the daylight hours and let loose a plague of human-eating monsters that prey on New York's populace during the long nights. Whole communities turn on one another; riots break out over food; gangs wage war on the public; and Rasalom grows strong as he feeds on the chaos his creatures have caused. The only one who can stop this horror is Glaeken, an enfeebled old warrior who has battled the demon across time and space. Too weak to fight alone, Glaeken gathers supernatural forces to assist him, among them a boy with mysterious powers, a 150-year-.old witch and a vigilante named Repairman Jack. The death of one of the fighters reveals the overwhelming strength of the satanic forces, who have reserved a particularly gruesome fate for Glaeken. Wilson has written a terrifying horror that is also a solid old-fashioned morality tale.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Reintroducing characters and situations from The Keep ( LJ 8/81) and his other novels, Wilson completes a trilogy about an age-old struggle for the world between two primeval forces. In Reborn (Dark Harvest, 1990) and Reprisal (Dark Harvest, 1991), the entity Rasalom, who had seemingly been defeated by the warrior Glaeken, returned to bring death and destruction to those surrounding him. Now, as he mutates into evil incarnate deep in the earth, the days grow shorter and horrible night creatures fly and crawl out of enormous holes to scavenge among humanity. Glaeken, now old, must send his friends on a quest to reclaim totems that will defeat Rasalom before his metamorphosis is complete. Part horror, part adventure, Nightworld is a thrilling and worthy successor to Wilson's earlier works. Although it can be read singly, constant references to earlier events almost demand a familiarity with at least the rest of the trilogy. Horror and fantasy fans will enjoy this one.
- Eric W. Johnson, Teikyo Post Univ. Lib., Waterbury, Ct.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Dark Harvest Books; First Edition edition (July 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0913165719
• ISBN-13: 978-0913165713
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,649,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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

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

By 

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

This review is from: Nightworld (Mass Market 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?

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

This review is from: Nightworld (Hardcover)

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...

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Just when you thought evil couldn't get any worse..., July 21, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Nightworld (Mass Market Paperback)

Truly a master of his art, F. Paul Wilson grabs you HARD and doesn't let go with Nightworld. I read The Keep. Scared the hell out of me. I read The Tomb and The Touch. Great stories, but I never saw the connection. Then, with Reborn and Reprisal, I was beginning to see what was coming. And Nightworld was it. Rasalom (evil incarnate) is freaking nasty. There is nothing he wouldn't do to get this planet called 'Earth'. Nightworld was a 24-hour book. Set aside 24 hours straight, becuase you cannot put the book down. Characters that span 5 novels come together to fight an evil that is older than "Old". To take the time and patience to write 5 books to set the stage for this final novel is a talent most of us can only dream of. I'm glad Mr. Wilson chose to share it with us. You MUST read the five aforementioned novels to get the true feeling of this series. You won't be sorry.