F. Paul Wilson, Ground Zero, Gauntlet Publications, 2009, 380 pages, $60.00.
“But why him? Why can’t someone else —?”
“Because there is no one else, and he knows that. So he does what needs to be done, or at least tries to. Though he hates it, though he wants no part of any of it, that is what he must do, because that is the way he is. That is the only way he knows, the only path he can see...” Ground Zero, p. 337.

Whenever the notion of furtive conspiracies arises to explain some heinous, unthinkable act — whether the Kennedy assassination, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11 — the existence of shadowy cabals secretly directing the course of society is usually dismissed with a disdainful sniff by those who prefer Occam’s Razor to paranoiac fantasies. Why complicate matters? such commentators ask. When spectacular disasters occur — especially ones that intersect with the political realm — it makes far more sense to explain them by appealing to the unwitting consequences generated by ignorance, stupidity, or insanity than by complex webs of cause-and-effect manipulated by hidden puppet masters.

It is certainly true that many manmade calamities are attributable to normal human failings and shortcomings. Yet a possibility that is rarely raised when misfortune strikes is that some people are — to put it bluntly and simply — evil. To be “evil,” however, is not merely to adhere to some Biblical prescription of human nature. The notion of “Original Sin” is literally nonsensical in the context of any valid moral system. Only actions (and the reasonably foreseeable consequences of such actions) that an individual chooses to commit can legitimately be laid at his or her feet. To be “sinful” (or “evil”) for no reason other than a person’s existence is as wrongheaded as holding an individual ethically culpable because of his skin color. Without the conceptual capacity and the opportunity to select among alternatives (i.e., the trait of “free will” or volition), morality is impossible. And no ethical judgments can or should be made unless and until a person acts on a choice he has made. (Pace Jimmy Carter, thinking about adultery is not the moral equivalent of committing adultery.)

Viewed from another angle, “evil” — or better, perhaps, “Evil” — as such does not exist. There is no Platonic Ideal that magically filters into human minds and corrupts them. A better way of understanding human “evil” is to realize that the “human” part is, in reality, the operative word. “Evil” or the immoral or the unethical is, in essence, that which is destructive to human values and the context needed to achieve those life-affirming conditions. The “good” or moral or ethical is, then, what is constructive or facilitative of the lives of individual humans (since only individuals exist; “society” [which does not exist in any literal fashion] is merely a shorthand way to describe the complex relationships among individual people]).

In the universe of F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack, however, such distinctions break down. In this fictional reality, the Otherness that seeks to transform earth and human civilization into a living hell is the embodiment of evil. In the person of Rasalom — a.k.a., the Adversary, the One —the Otherness thrives on “...the terror, the panic, the chaos, the pain, the death, the grief and misery of loss” (p. 375). It is destruction personified: anti-life, anti-happiness, anti-value, inimical to what makes life both conceivable and worth experiencing.