Reprisal

Reprisal is the fifth book in the Adversary Cycle by F. Paul Wilson. It is clearly a sequel to The Keep and Reborn unlike The Tomb, book 2, and The Touch, book 3. The supernatural themes are mostly confined to the center and near the end of Reprisal. Out of all the Adversary Cycle books, it is the least heroic of the books and seemed to operate on less of a global ramification (good versus evil, fate of the whole world depends on the outcome of this conflict) and more of an intimate, individual, even local level (will this person ever feel secure, loved and less haunted by the past). Each character has glaring human frailties, insecurities and flaws. I can imagine that some people may scoff at the idea that the most evil being in the world just wants to wreak havoc on one individual at a time, but it worked for me if you think of it as the reader getting a glimpse at a microcosm of the evil unleashed in that individual’s life, how it affects others whom that individual cares for and then imagine the evil being wreaking the same havoc on every person on earth. In the end, Reprisal seems to suggest that the only way to solve evil is not give in to any evil even when it seems justified (wanting to kill a rapist or child abuser). The older the edition of the book in The Adversary Cycle, the more distracting and glaring the typos are.