A Note From F. Paul Wilson:
The Adversary Cycle didn’t start out as a cycle. I like doing connected stories – future histories or separate stories sharing the same milieu – but had no intention of doing a series. So the first three novels were intended as stand alones. Completely unrelated. As a matter of fact, Wm. Morrow rejected The Tomb because it was too unlike The Keep. And The Touch was like neither.
Then I went to work on a novel called The Chadham Clone. It too was meant to be a stand-alone, with no relation to The Keep. I wanted to misdirect you into thinking it was going to be like a Rosemary’s Baby or an Omen, then hit you with something different (just as The Keep looks like a vampire novel for a while, but is not). I wanted to use an evil entity other than the tired old Antichrist, but who? Then I realized I already had that entity in Rasalom from The Keep. I needed a suburban setting convenient to Manhattan, and realized I already had one in Monroe where The Touch took place. I became intrigued by the challenge of tying those two novels, and The Tomb as well, into Rasalom’s reincarnation, bringing the books full circle. It worked so well that I suspect my subconscious might have been linking them all along.
“You may have noticed that there’s no tomb in The Tomb . That’s because my title was Rakoshi, but the publisher insisted on a change. I’ll tell the full story in an introduction to the Borderlands edition, but for now I’m delighted to know that exactly twenty years after its first publication, the definitive edition of the first Repairman Jack novel will appear under its original title.
Matched Numbered Set:
Publisher | Borderlands Press |
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