Reprisal

Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1991. Signed Limited Deluxe First Edition Limited to 450 copies of which this is P/C signed by author and both illustrators. Hardcover. Very good. John Lakey and Laura Lakey. 332 pages. Minor red soiling to edges. Francis Paul Wilson (born May 17, 1946, in Jersey City, New Jersey) is an American author, primarily in the science fiction and horror genres, and a medical doctor. Wilson made his first sales in 1970 to Analog while still in medical school, and continued to write science fiction throughout the seventies. His debut novel was Healer (1976). In 1981, he ventured into the horror genre with the international bestseller The Keep. In the 1990s, he moved from science fiction and horror to medical thrillers and interactive scripting for Disney Interactive and other multimedia companies. Among Wilson's best-known characters is the anti-hero Repairman Jack, an urban mercenary introduced in the 1984 New York Times bestseller The Tomb. Throughout his writing - especially in his earlier science fiction works (most notably An Enemy of the State) - Wilson has included explicitly libertarian political philosophy which extends to his "Repairman Jack" series. He won the first Prometheus Award in 1979 for his novel Wheels Within Wheels and another in 2004 for Sims. The Libertarian Futurist Society has also honored Wilson with their Hall of Fame Award for Healer (in 1990) and An Enemy of the State (in 1991). In 2015 he received the third special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement; the previous two recipients were Poul Anderson and Vernor Vinge. In 2021, his "Lipidleggin'" won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. The Adversary Cycle is a series of seven novels written by American author F. Paul Wilson. While it was originally known as "The Nightworld Cycle" (this name is even printed in the front of some early editions of Nightworld), John Clute, in his section on F. Paul Wilson's work in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, kept referring to "the Adversary." The author liked that better and so renamed the cycle. The book series does not fall into a strict chronological order, with alternative orderings suggested. For example, Wilson's online presence suggests an order of The Keep, Reborn, The Touch, The Tomb, Reprisal, Signalz, and Nightworld. "Who am I? Why, I'm you. Or parts of you. The best parts. I'm the touch of Richard Speck, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and Bin Laden in all of you. I am the thousand tiny angers and fleeting rages of your day—at the car that cuts you off on the freeway, at the kid who sneaks ahead of you in line at the movies, at the old fart with the full basket in the eight-items-only express checkout at the supermarket. I'm the nasty glee in the name-callers and the long-suffering pain, the self-loathing, the smoldering resentment, the suppressed rage, and the never-to-be-fulfilled promises of revenge in their targets. I'm the daily business betrayals and the corporate men's room character assassinations. I'm the husband who beats his wife, the mother who scalds her child, I'm the playground beatings of your little boys, the backseat rapes of your daughters. I'm your rage toward a child molester and I'm the pederast's lust for your child, for his own child. I'm the guards' contempt for their prisoners and the prisoners' hatred for their guards, I'm the shank, I'm the truncheon, I'm the shiv. I'm the bayonet in the throat of the political dissident, the meat hook on which he is hung, the cattle prod that caresses his genitals. You've kept me alive, you've made me strong. I am you." The immortal evil defeated in The Keep and reincarnated in Reborn has come of age and begun to settle scores. He targets a few unlucky individuals for destruction now, but soon the whole world will suffer. And he will feed on our tears and our pain. John and Laura Lakey are a husband and wife team of illustrators. While each of them has produced solo artwork, they more commonly work together. Between the two of them, they have produced hundreds of published illustrations for role-playing games, science fiction publications, fantasy books & magazines, kids' books, and comic publishers. From the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, John was also the creative director for the company, Original Appalachian Artworks, that produced the Cabbage Patch Kids. Later, he was the pre-production designer for Fox Feature Animation on such movies as Titan A.E. and Anastasia. John and Laura Lakey have produced interior illustrations for many Dungeons & Dragons books and associated novels since 1987, as well as cover art for Five Coins for a Kingdom (1987), Queen's Harvest (1989), Child's Play (1989), The Sea People (1990), Patriots of Ulek (1992), Fighter's Challenge (1992), Volo's Guide to the North (1993), The Murky Deep (1993), The Dalelands (1993), Hour of the Knife (1994), and Volo's Guide to Cormyr (1995). They have also produced artwork for other games including Hero System (Hero Games), Vampire: The Masquerade (White Wolf), and the live-action role-playing game Mind's Eye Theatre (White Wolf).