2026 PREP THREAD for Group Read of F. Paul Wilson's The Secret History of the World Series

Welcome to the 2026 Group Read for F. Paul Wilson’s series The Secret History of the World.

But, you might be saying, 2026 is yet two months away. Well, this particular series is a long and varied one, with many entries. So, in order that folks might be prepared for the read, we wanted to allow a couple of months for collecting up the books and stories, whether in physical or electronic form. Once the good Doctor {Neutron} has next year’s group organized and posted, I will repost this entry for the official group read purposes.

The ‘I’ there means blackdogbooks, a 75’er since 2008. Back in those early days, I sponsored the Halloween reads until I petered out for a bit. I resurrected the Halloween read this year, which is where this little concern was seeded by another 75’er, amanda4242. She very kindly helped me to put together the following reading list. You may also refer to Wilson’s website for a reading list here: https://repairmanjack.com/books/the-secret-history-of-the-world/

This is not a very structured group read – no specific goals like titles per month or anything like that. Everyone should just read at their own pace, and post at their own pace. And, please, post your thoughts and reviews and progress as you go along, always minding the SPOILER for those not reading at your pace. My personal goal is to read at a pace so as to use the whole year to read the series.

Here’s the reading list, with some basic information about the title’s place in the chronology, and a few other bits. Speaking of bits –

One title you’ll see below several times is a collection, Aftershock & Others: 19 Oddities. While the other oddities are not specifically part of the series, there are fairly long interludes dropped in by Wilson to discuss his work in the context of his life. From dipping in, they are quite interesting. So, I plan to read that book in December this year before kicking off the group read, leaving out the bits that need to be read in the series chronology. Just an appetizer of sorts.

The Past

Demonsong (Prehistory)
This short story/novella can be found in Secret Stories: Tales from the Secret History of the World. There is an original stand-alone publication available at some used book sites, but it’s quite collectible and the prices I’ve seen are above $100. Another option is to find it electronically – one option is Smashwords. Here’s a link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/23892
It’s also available on Kindle and Nook. Thanks to amanda 4242 for the link and suggestions for availability.

The Compendium of Srem (1498)
This short story/novella is a bit hard to find, as I can’t find any collections in which it was included. I was able to find an inexpensive copy at Otto Penzler’s bookstore in NYC, The Mysterious Bookshop. But it may be available elsewhere.

Wardenclyffe (1903-1906)

Aryans and Absinthe (1923-1924)
This short story can be found in a couple of collections – Secret Stories: Tales from the Secret History of the World and Aftershock & Others: 19 Oddities. The latter is an interesting collection in its own right, as it has lengthy interludes from Wilson about his life in chronological context with the writings.

Black Wind (1926-1945)

The Keep (1941) – Subseries: Adversary Cycle

Reborn (February-March 1968) – Subseries: Adversary Cycle

Dat Tay Vao (March 1968) – Subseries: Adversary Cycle
This short story was later expanded to compose the novel The Touch, which falls much later in the chronology. So, I’m going to be reading the short story here. It can be found in a couple of different collections – Secret Stories: Tales from the Secret History of the World and Soft and Others: 16 Stories of Wonder and Dread. The latter is actually Wilson’s first published collection, and may have been reprinted to include as many as 21 collected stories.

Jack: Secret Histories (1983) – Subseries: Repairman Jack YA
This one and the two following were nominally published as YA titles, as they cover Repairman Jack’s young life.

Jack: Secret Circles (1983) – Subseries: Repairman Jack YA

Jack: Secret Vengeance (1983) – Subseries: Repairman Jack YA

Faces (1988)
This short story can be found in a couple of collections – Secret Stories: Tales from the Secret History of the World and The Barrens and Others.

Cold City (1990) – Subseries: Repairman Jack Early Years

Dark City (1991) – Subseries: Repairman Jack Early Years

Fear City (1993) – Subseries: Repairman Jack Early Years

Fix (2006)
This novella was a mash-up/meet-up story with a female assassin, Codename: Chandler, that has her own series as written by J.A. Konrath and Ann Voss Peterson. The novella is the first one in a collection of three, Fix, Rescue, Free: Three Complete Thriller Novellas (Codename: Chandler)

Year Zero Minus Three

Sibs (February)

The Tomb (summer) – Subseries: Adversary Cycle and Repairman Jack

The Barrens(ends in September)
Short story collected in Secret Stories: Tales from the Secret History of the World and The Barrens and Others.

A Day in the Life (October)
Short story collected in Quick Fixes: Tales of Repairman Jack and The Barrens and Others.

The Long Way Home
Short story collected in Quick Fixes: Tales of Repairman Jack.

Legacies (December) – Subseries: Repairman Jack

Year Zero Minus Two

Interlude at Duane’s (April)
Short story collected in Aftershock & Others: 19 Oddities and Quick Fixes: Tales of Repairman Jack.

Home Repairs – Subseries: Repairman Jack
This short story was later expanded to compose the novel Conspiracies. So, I’ll be reading the short story first – it’s collected in Quick Fixes: Tales of Repairman Jack.

Conspiracies (April) – Subseries: Repairman Jack

The Last Rakosh – Subseries: Repairman Jack
This short story was later expanded to compose the novel All the Rage. So, I’ll be reading the short story first – it’s collected in Quick Fixes: Tales of Repairman Jack.

All the Rage (May) – Subseries: Repairman Jack

Hosts (June) – Subseries: Repairman Jack

The Haunted Air (August) – Subseries: Repairman Jack

The Upwelling (August) – Subseries: The Hidden

F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack: Scar-Lip Redux (August) – Subseries: Repairman Jack
This is a graphic novel.

Lexie (August) – Subseries: The Hidden

Gateways (September) – Subseries: Repairman Jack

Crisscross (November) – Subseries: Repairman Jack

Infernal (December) – Subseries: Repairman Jack

Year Zero Minus One

Harbingers (January) – Subseries: Repairman Jack

Infernal Night (with Heather Graham) – Subseries: Repairman Jack
Another mash-up, this time Repairman Jack goes up against Michael Quinn of Heather Graham’s Cafferty and Quinn series. It can be found in a collection entitled Faceoff ed. by David Baldacci.

Bloodline (April) – Subseries: Repairman Jack

The Fifth Harmonic (April)

Panacea (April) – Subseries: ICE Sequence

By the Sword (May) – Subseries: Repairman Jack

The God Gene (May) – Subseries: ICE Sequence

Ground Zero (July) – Subseries: Repairman Jack

The Touch (ends in August) – Subseries: Adversary Cycle

The Void Protocol (September) – Subseries: ICE Sequence

The Peabody-Ozymandias Traveling Circus & Oddity Emporium (ends in September)

Tenants
Short story collected in Secret Stories: Tales from the Secret History of the World and The Barrens and Others.

The Last Christmas (December) – Subseries: Repairman Jack

Year Zero

Pelts
Short story collected in Secret Stories: Tales from the Secret History of the World and The Barrens and Others.

Reprisal (ends in February) – Subseries: Adversary Cycle

The Wringer – Subseries: Repairman Jack
This short story was later expanded to compose the novel All the Rage. So, I’ll be reading the short story first – it’s collected in Quick Fixes: Tales of Repairman Jack.

Fatal Error (February) – Subseries: Repairman Jack

Double Threat (February-March) – Subseries: Duad

Double Dose (March) – Subseries: Duad

The Dark at the End (March) – Subseries: Repairman Jack

Signalz (May) – Subseries: Adversary Cycle

Nightworld (May) – Subseries: Repairman Jack and Adversary Cycle
There are alternate versions of this novel; you’ll want the more recent expended version, Nightworld {Revised} (Adversary Cycle). Or you can choose your poison; or read both.

Looking forward to seeing a bunch of you nerd out with us!!!!

Got this on the group wiki and posted on the group announcements.

Spread the word!

>1 blackdogbooks: Thanks for setting this up!

For the short stories, I'm pretty sure all of them except The Last Rakosh are reprinted in The Compendium of F books, which are $4.99 each for the e-books. The Compendium of Srem is widely available as an e-book and usually sells for 99 cents.

>3 amanda4242: I will include that information when I transfer the thread over in the new year - thanks, again, Amanda for finding good stuff.

Not sure who is lurking here, but thought I'd weigh in on my personal quest to collect up all these titles in physical form -

Just got one of the last three I've been looking for, The Last Christmas: A Repairman Jack Novel.

I have two to go - Scar Lip Redux and Double Dose. The elusive of those is the latter, as most places only have it in audio book or eBook format. A________ has it, but I don't shop through them any longer. Since it is close to the end of the list, I am going to hold out.

>5 blackdogbooks: I'm not finding any paper copies of Double Dose outside of Amazon either. The ebook publisher is Crossroad Press, so you could try contacting them to see if they also publish it in paper and if they know where you might get a non-amazon copy. Their email is crossroad@crossroadpress.com

>6 amanda4242: that’s a good idea, though I have gotten lucky at ThriftBooks. And they had that one at one point, I just didn’t jump on it quickly enough.

>7 blackdogbooks: Found a non-amazon place that sells it! Bad news is that it's a special numbered edition that costs $60.

https://www.gauntletpress.com/product/double-dose/

You did some scouring!

>9 blackdogbooks: I hate being unable to find things, so I had to keep looking!

As promised, until Doc gets the 2026 group up and running, I'm going to post some stuff from the biographical materials F. Paul Wilson included in Aftershock & Others: 19 Oddities, as they relate to The Secret History of the World.

The opening biographical account is centered on 1990, which would be a huge year for the series.

While writing Midnight Mass for an anthology, in which it would not ultimately appear, Wilson is writing Reprisal.

Wilson was asked to be the Guest of Honor for the World Fantasy Convention for that year, and it's customary to include a work from the guest in the program book - Wilson knocked out The Last Rakish, which would later be folded into All the Rage. He used Repairman Jack because the wife of the man who asked him to be GoH loved Jack. He dedicated the story to her.

The Dark Harvest hardcover of Reborn was published that year. Wilson hadn't yet conceived of The Adversary Cycle, but this would eventually become the second in that sub-series. A Jove mass-market edition of the book appeared a few months later with a cover Wilson hated, and he says the cover would come back to haunt him - it has a 'lolling-tongued demon leering from atop a doorway.'

Another request for a story to appear in an anthology produced Home Repairs., which would later be folded into Conspiracies.

Yet another such request produced The Long Way Home.

He finished revising Reprisal and set out for Hawaii to research for Nightworld.

The next biographical note of note has to do with the cover of Reborn. Over the course of the years 1991-1993, the paperback of that book sold so poorly that Wilson's publisher passed on one of his next books, Sibs, which is also part of the series. Wilson blames the bad cover he described earlier. He landed on his feet with the publication of The Select, though he initially title it The Ingraham and saw it published under a pen name in Europe as The Foundation.

Then, in 1993, among other projects, he was asked by Douglas E. Winter to provide a story for an anthology - the theme of the anthology was a novella for each decade. Wilson chose 1920 and wrote Aryans and Absinthe. The anthology was eventually published in 1997 as Revelations.

In researching for the book, he used Hitler: The Path to Power, which just went on my list to search for, as it sounds like a great history.

Winter is best known for editing Prime Evil - have a copy but haven't read it. And for The Art of Darkness, which is often described as an authorized biography of Stephen King - it's a great read, with lots of direct information from tons of interviews he did with Uncle Stevie.

I'm going to skip Aryans and Absinthe for now and come back to the story in its chronologically proper place in the series.

In 1996, Wilson had a medical thriller owing to a three-book deal he'd made but couldn't think of a medical plot he liked for the book. Rather, he had a techy thriller idea and decided to finally return to Repairman Jack, whom he'd left bleeding to death in the only other book he'd written with the character a decade before. This would be Legacies, and he'd write the draft over 1996 and 1997.

In 1997, Wilson also started The Fifth Harmonic, which he described as 'unlike anything he'd ever done.' Interestingly, this one and Panacea don't show up in his listing of the series at the front of Aftershock & Others. A comparison of the listing in Aftershock & Others with other listings of the series show several differences. Aftershock & Others came out in 2009, so he's tweaked the series titles since then to include more of his work - all said so that you're careful which listing you use. The one above is the most complete for the read-through next year.

Failed to include this little tidbit from the 1997 biographical note - in October off that year, Wilson spent several days editing and re-tooling The Tomb for a Forge Books reprint. He was unhappy with some how some things would read in the reprint as anachronisms from the original. The original came out in 1984, so he saw the book firmly rooted in the 80s and needed updating. As examples, he listed the depiction of Times Square before the Disneyfication, and Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. He also confesses he thinks the prose seemed overwritten.

I'm glad to have an original 1984 version, as I'd rather have a book that is firmly rooted in the time in which it was written. We'll see how I feel about the prose.

All to say, we may not be reading the same versions, depending on whether you have later reprints or originals.

Well, I take that back, I have a 1998 version of The Tomb, so I don't get to read the original version....unless I snag an earlier copy between now and then.

In 1998, Wilson finished a draft of The Fifth Harmonic claiming that it nearly wrote itself because it was such a personal story. The inspiration was an acquaintance who was diagnosed with cancer. Wilson started wondering what he'd do if diagnosed with something almost certainly untreatable, and decided he'd explore every possible cure. The premise of the book is that a skeptic begins to see possibilities in some New Age concepts.

He also begin working on Conspiracies, and his research took him to a UFO conference, and then finished a draft in October. He said had more fun writing it than any others to that time....including a fair bit of humor infused in the book.

Legacies was published.

At the end of the year, Wilson's second short story collection was published, the Barrens and Others.

All in all, 1998 was a big year for Jack!

1999 saw the beginning and completion of All the Rage, though it was initially titled Tendencies, which Wilson thought an awful title.

It was also the year that Wilson got https://repairmanjack.com/ live. As of the publication of this book he says he was on there and interacting daily. That may not be true any longer.

Years 2000-2003 were big years for Repairman Jack and the Secret History - Those years saw the writing and/or publication and/or reprint of:

Conspiracies
Hosts
All the Rage
The Haunted Air
The Fifth Harmonic
Gateways
Crisscross

An interesting side note during this time, Beacon Pictures kept renewing their option to film The Tomb to get Jack on the big screen, but over the years, the studios never liked the scripts. They came close in 2002-2003. The studio wanted Hugh Jackman to star, but he was unavailable. Then, they wanted The Rock or Vin Diesel. I can't think of three worse choices for the character. The film never got made.

Also, obviously 9/11 - which Wilson said put a crimp in his writing; he felt like his chosen profession didn't mean a lot given the gravity of what had happened. He was comforted, he said, that the bad guys in his books got what was coming to them.

>18 blackdogbooks: Hugh Jackman, The Rock, or Vin Diesel for Repairman Jack??? Clearly no one at the studio actually read the books.

Agreed - it'd be fun to consider that choice as we read next year. Or maybe you already have someone in mind who you see as Jack.

>20 blackdogbooks: When I first read the books, gosh, over ten years ago now, I pictured David Anders as Jack.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1044403/?ref_=nmbio_ov_bk

Well, I remember that guy more from Alias, and he bugged the crap out of me. But I get the fit, if he'd darken his hair and tone his personality way down. It's been awhile since I read any of these, so I need to read again and see what bubbles up.

>22 blackdogbooks: His character on Alias was kind of supposed to be an asshole, and he's been in other things where he's not annoying.

2004 has the drafting of Infernal. There was some work with a Japanese artist to put together a Jack video gam - never came to fruition, again because of the Beacon film people who owned the rights at that point.

Apparently a big name star expressed interest in playing Jack on the screen, but he was at the time in his mid to late twenties, which Wilson thought too young. He didn't interfere though, as he was suspect about it ever happening anyway.

He did another rewrite on The Tomb - it seems that is the one most rewritten over the years. This one was published by Borderlands, and was eventually printed in a limited edition under the title Rakoshi, which was Wilson's original title.

Wilson is not a big fan of the Michael Mann version of The Keep, so much so that he put together his own commentary track, with Douglas E. Winter, which they wanted to include in the Paramount Home Entertainment DVD version of the film. They taped the commentary, even though Paramount wasn't interested in it, intending to release it as a CD to be played along the movie. They were going to call it Dude, Where's My Book?. But the release of the DVD was put off indefinitely. I wonder if they ever produced that CD???

I'll be skipping the last story in the collection for now, Interlude at Duane's so the I can read it in the chronology next year. But a couple more biographical notes from Wilson for 2005 and an Afterword.

2005 -

There was work on a graphic novel for The Keep Graphic Novel, which appears to have been published.

Another rewrite/new script for the Repairman Jack film....

Working on a draft of the tenth Jack novel. He didn't have a title but asked folks on the forum for suggestions and a reader provided Harbingers.

Revising The Last Rakosh for a new printing by Overlook Connection Press.

Wilson resurrected The Long Way Home from his desk to provide for Amazon (Booooooo) as an e-pub.

Showtime asked to adapt Pelts for their Masters of Horror series. This eventually came off, with Dario Argento directing, and in the Afterword Wilson says he was happy with the product though it was quite violent and contained more sex than he wrote.

Also, in the Afterword -

Wilson says he's not going to produce any further short fiction - he agrees he may collect up some of the previous work for additional anthologies but he doesn't want to actually write any more short fiction.

There was a failed attempt at a TV series for The Touch, and the company retained the rights so that no one else can do it.

At the time of the writing of the Afterword (2007-2008??), Ryan Reynolds was he chosen star to take on Repairman Jack. I don't find this a good fit either - he's too bombastic and showy. But it doesn't appear to have happened anyway.

Wilson branched out into YA with Jack, writing Jack: Secret Histories.

That's all for Aftershock & Others. I'll see whoever is coming along in the 2026 Group Read.

If anyone is interested, Michael Mann's The Keep is on sale for $4.99 on Prime. It's, um, not great, but neither is it the worst adaptation I've seen.

I’m a huge Mann fan. But I watched that movie decades ago.

Worst adaptation? That fowl thing they did to The Dark Tower.

>27 blackdogbooks: Does The Dark Tower even count as an adaptation? I don't think they used anything from the books besides the characters' names.

I listened to a great episode of the podcast The Kingcast this week. The hosts had someone who has never read the books watch that movie and then discuss it with them. It was quite fun. The best metaphor they could come up with was a dump cake - throwing everything in and twisting it around. There’s a lot of the series in the movie. Just bastardized and twisted almost beyond recognition.

BTW - that’s another year-long read through I’m considering for 2027. All of the books that tough the Dark Tower with the canon books included. I’m going to research and see if anyone’s put together a chrono reading list of it all. I need to shake up my reading of the books this the next time thru.

Here’s a good starting point article.

https://geekunchained.wordpress.com/2015/09/21/the-dark-tower-an-introductory-gu...

But I want to consult some of my own books to make sure I don’t leave anything out.

For example, the list in the article doesn’t include The Talisman, but does include Black House.