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The Secret History of the World #2
Aftershock & Others: 16 Oddities
Aftershock and Others is the third collection of short fiction by New York Times bestselling author F. Paul Wilson, hailed by the Rocky Mountain News as "among the finest storytellers of our times." Includes the short story that was the basis for the short "Foet." The title novelette won the Bram Stoker Award. Its companions touch on the past, present, and future—from the inflationary insanity of Weimar Germany ("Aryans and Absinthe") to disco-club-era Manhattan ("When He Was Fab"), to the rationing of medical services in a grim near future ("Offshore"). Wilson's stylistic diversity and versatility are on display in stories that pay tribute to Ray Bradbury ("The November Game"), use a sentient killer virus as a point-of-view character ("Lysing toward Bethlehem"), and pay unabashed homage to pure pulp fiction in two yellow peril stories ("Sex Slaves of the Dragon Tong" and "Part of the Game"). And finally, Wilson treats us to his popular antihero Repairman Jack at his most trapped in a drugstore with four killers ("Interlude at Duane's").At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
364 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2009
27 people are currently reading
358 people want to read
About the author
F. Paul Wilson
422 books2,001 followersFrancis Paul Wilson is an author, born in Jersey City, New Jersey. He writes novels and short stories primarily in the science fiction and horror genres. His debut novel was Healer (1976). Wilson is also a part-time practicing family physician. He made his first sales in 1970 to Analog and continued to write science fiction throughout the seventies. In 1981 he ventured into the horror genre with the international bestseller, The Keep, and helped define the field throughout the rest of the decade. In the 1990s he became a true genre hopper, moving from science fiction to horror to medical thrillers and branching into interactive scripting for Disney Interactive and other multimedia companies. He, along with Matthew J. Costello, created and scripted FTL Newsfeed which ran daily on the Sci-Fi Channel from 1992-1996.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/fpaulw...
http://us.macmillan.com/author/fpaulw...
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
September 6, 2025
This is a good collection of shorter works penned by F. Paul Wilson.
Unfortunately, the personal notes punctuating the works were neither warm nor charming. They were full of "and so & so asked for a story for such anthology", "and then this bestseller happened", "and the film never came off". Proper killjoys they were.
The stories were solid. Longer works tended to slacken, as Wilson tried to literalise good, clean concepts into something high-brow, and mostly failed. The shorter works were vastly superior and proved why he is a legend. My favourites were~
1. The November Game— Bradbury might have been proud reading this;
2. Foet— a chilling tale of choices;
3. Please Don't Hurt Me— if a truly dark story can ever make you laugh out loud, then this is it;
4. Sex Slaves of the Dragon Tong— pure pulpy fun;
5. Part of the Game— another pulpy tale of Yellow Peril;
6. Interlude at Duanne's— a thriller involving Repairman Jack, and the best of the lot.
A Good read.
Unfortunately, the personal notes punctuating the works were neither warm nor charming. They were full of "and so & so asked for a story for such anthology", "and then this bestseller happened", "and the film never came off". Proper killjoys they were.
The stories were solid. Longer works tended to slacken, as Wilson tried to literalise good, clean concepts into something high-brow, and mostly failed. The shorter works were vastly superior and proved why he is a legend. My favourites were~
1. The November Game— Bradbury might have been proud reading this;
2. Foet— a chilling tale of choices;
3. Please Don't Hurt Me— if a truly dark story can ever make you laugh out loud, then this is it;
4. Sex Slaves of the Dragon Tong— pure pulpy fun;
5. Part of the Game— another pulpy tale of Yellow Peril;
6. Interlude at Duanne's— a thriller involving Repairman Jack, and the best of the lot.
A Good read.
May 25, 2023
I do not care for short-story collections, especially since audiobooks/voice-reader apps!
Read
October 24, 2011Like most short story collections, I'm not going to rate the whole book as I did not read every story. I got this to read two short stories that pertain to Wilson's Secret History of the World. I also read some of the others if they seemed interesting enough to me. I also read the author's blurbs between the stories. I usually find that interesting and it was in this book as well.
It led me to read another short story by Ray Bradbury called October Games. That was a good, creepy story.
It led me to read another short story by Ray Bradbury called October Games. That was a good, creepy story.
May 11, 2017
F. Paul Wilson is one of my favorite authors, and these are well written short stories. Those two factor in themselves got it three and a half stars. Why I gave it four stars was for the year by year commentary by Mr.Wilson. Being a fan, it was very interesting to me to see what he was going through, especially the years that I was reading his work. Like most anthologies there are a couple of excellent stories, some good ones and a couple that struggled to be fair. You expect that from a book of short stories, what you really read for are those top tales. I most enjoyed the title story and Aryans and Absinthe. The latter a good read for Repairman Jack fans. I was actually a little disappointed in the actual RJ short story, it was too short and lacked Jack's usual humor and inventiveness. I think I liked his previous short story collection, The Barrens and Others, better. However, don't get me wrong, this book is worth reading, especially if you appreciate F. Paul Wilson.
October 27, 2021
Wilson's third and final(?) short story collection. I'd read at least two or three before. For the most part they're good, but not the best of Wilson's work. Part of the issue, as is loosely explained in the various interludes and intros Wilson wrote in the book, is probably due to the fact that several of the stories were cobbled together quickly because someone requested a contribution for one anthology or another. If you're a big Wilson fan you're more likely to enjoy these.
June 14, 2024
Wilson has long been one of my favorite short story writers. His expansive imagination and inventiveness know no bounds. That said, any short fiction collection is uneven and somewhat disjointed by its nature of pulling in diverse tales covering many different areas of subject matter. I really enjoyed “Foet,” “Offshore,” “Anna,” and “Sole Custody.” The others, not so much. I still like his first collection, Soft and Others, the best.
February 17, 2019
This is a fantastic collection. Not a bad apple in the bunch. The title story was awesome, and as a woodworker I loved Anna.
November 22, 2020
Hated it, got have way through and didn’t finish
January 23, 2011
I seem to have a love-hate affair with anthologies. I do love short stories—the most effective of them can kick you in the teeth or affect you emotionally in other ways (in different ways that a novel usually can’t, and I’m not smart enough to know how that is). But I find that a lot of anthologies leave me with a distinct feeling of “meh” when I get to the end of them—some stories are great, some are okay, and some make me wonder why I read them. I do seem to have better luck, though, with single-author collections, and I did in this case as well.
This collection, Dr. Wilson’s third (and, as he says in his Afterword, his last), covers his story output from 1990 through 2005, and he introduces every year with a brief sketch of what happened that year in his writing and in other projects (like the long-running soap opera that is the Repairman Jack movie).
For the most part, I enjoyed the stories in this volume. Only one of them (the last, “Interlude at Duane’s”) is directly related to either his Adversary Cycle or the Repairman Jack series—or at least, only one that I picked up on. I had previously read almost none of these stories, so their discovery was, for the most part, a real pleasure. There is a story in here whose title I can’t put here (because it involves printing three five-character strings over the top of each other) that was particularly fascinating, as was “Please Don’t Hurt Me,” an experimental story that is told entirely in dialogue.
As with any anthology, there are a couple that didn’t ring with me, such as “Sole Custody” and “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad I read them, but they just didn’t have that punch. And the story “Lysing Towards Bethlehem” left me scratching my head.
Maybe I’m biased, since Dr. Wilson is one of my favorite authors, but I would definitely recommend picking this book up, curling up in your favorite chair, and enjoying short bites of excellent fiction.
This collection, Dr. Wilson’s third (and, as he says in his Afterword, his last), covers his story output from 1990 through 2005, and he introduces every year with a brief sketch of what happened that year in his writing and in other projects (like the long-running soap opera that is the Repairman Jack movie).
For the most part, I enjoyed the stories in this volume. Only one of them (the last, “Interlude at Duane’s”) is directly related to either his Adversary Cycle or the Repairman Jack series—or at least, only one that I picked up on. I had previously read almost none of these stories, so their discovery was, for the most part, a real pleasure. There is a story in here whose title I can’t put here (because it involves printing three five-character strings over the top of each other) that was particularly fascinating, as was “Please Don’t Hurt Me,” an experimental story that is told entirely in dialogue.
As with any anthology, there are a couple that didn’t ring with me, such as “Sole Custody” and “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad I read them, but they just didn’t have that punch. And the story “Lysing Towards Bethlehem” left me scratching my head.
Maybe I’m biased, since Dr. Wilson is one of my favorite authors, but I would definitely recommend picking this book up, curling up in your favorite chair, and enjoying short bites of excellent fiction.
October 16, 2013
Meh. I don't read a lot of horror and picked this up because I thought from the blurb that it would be more SF, but it was fairly straightforward horror, fairly forgettable. Not bad, just run-of-the-mill with nothing particularly striking about most of the stories. Two that stood out as more original than the others were "Foet," a truly gruesome statement on what people are willing to do to be high fashion, and one (whose title I can't reproduce because it requires special typesetting) about "The Answer," a mysterious word that becomes in the ears of the hearer whatever answer will be most to your benefit. For example, when the bookie says, "What horse do you want to bet on?" and you respond with The Answer, he hears whatever horse's name will win you the most money.
There's also a fun one (not horror) written in the style of the 1930s detective pulps that pits two big guys of the genre against each other. The characters are never named in the story, and Wilson says in his "Author's Notes" that if you can't identify them you're not allowed to read any more of his fiction; I'm happy to say I knew them immediately as :)
Since the stories are presented chronologically and each one is preceded by a brief summary by Wilson of what he was doing/working on during that period, if you really like Wilson you'll probably enjoy it more. I'd never heard of him before picking this up so I wasn't all that interested in the backstory of his writing projects (though the insights into early attempts at interactive fiction were kind of fun!).
There's also a fun one (not horror) written in the style of the 1930s detective pulps that pits two big guys of the genre against each other. The characters are never named in the story, and Wilson says in his "Author's Notes" that if you can't identify them you're not allowed to read any more of his fiction; I'm happy to say I knew them immediately as :)
Since the stories are presented chronologically and each one is preceded by a brief summary by Wilson of what he was doing/working on during that period, if you really like Wilson you'll probably enjoy it more. I'd never heard of him before picking this up so I wasn't all that interested in the backstory of his writing projects (though the insights into early attempts at interactive fiction were kind of fun!).
October 3, 2013
This is a good short story collection from F. Paul Wilson. As he did with earlier collections, he gives a summary of his work over the year the story was written as an introduction in addition to a preface to each story. In some ways, these are as interesting as the stories themselves, but also disheartening. Hardly a year goes by that doesn't deal with the ongoing frustration of being able to get "The Tomb" out of development hell and made into a film. There are no bad stories here, but some are better than others:
Two stories tie into the Secret History series: The WWII chiller called "Aryans and Absinthe" and the Repairman Jack short adventure "Interlude at Duane's"
"Offshore" is a medical dystopian thriller that sounds very realistic.
"Lysing Towards Bethlehem" is a neat story told from the POV of a virus.
By far, the best of all the stories is the well-deserved Edgar winning title story, "Aftershock". This is a fascinating page turner of a man trying to discover why a woman has been struck by lightning eight times and survived and, even more mysteriously, why she keeps trying to get hit. When the man discovers her reason, he joins her in her quest. It's an unusual but poignant love story as well as a supernatural fantasy.
Two stories tie into the Secret History series: The WWII chiller called "Aryans and Absinthe" and the Repairman Jack short adventure "Interlude at Duane's"
"Offshore" is a medical dystopian thriller that sounds very realistic.
"Lysing Towards Bethlehem" is a neat story told from the POV of a virus.
By far, the best of all the stories is the well-deserved Edgar winning title story, "Aftershock". This is a fascinating page turner of a man trying to discover why a woman has been struck by lightning eight times and survived and, even more mysteriously, why she keeps trying to get hit. When the man discovers her reason, he joins her in her quest. It's an unusual but poignant love story as well as a supernatural fantasy.
February 26, 2010
This collection of 19 short stories are arranged in the order in which they were written spanning the years 1990 to 2005. Preceding each story is autobiographical information concerning what Wilson was working on at the time showing some context and influences. Each story is also preceded by a short introduction generally concerning the genesis of the story to follow. This collection of stories are on a wide variety of themes and topics. A couple of stories are set in the 1930s--one in the Chinatown section of San Francisco (Sex Slaves of the Dragon Tong), the other in Germany on the eve of Hitler's rise to power (Aryans and Absinthe). Most were quite engaging and being a Repairman Jack fan, my favorite was "Interlude at Duane's".
May 26, 2014
I stopped reading Wilson a few years ago. I loved Repairman Jack, one of the best characters I'd seen in ages. When the Rakosh started featuring more and more in his stories, I thought, well, I'll keep going even tho I really don't dig the paranormal stuff. But when he pulled a Stephen King and wrote himself in his book, I gave up on the series.
But I do love his short stories. "Soft and others" is one of my favorite short story collections. So I figured I'd give this one a shot. I didn't think these stories were quite as good as those in "Soft..." Matter of fact, I like the earlier stories in this book better than his more recent.
Check out "Soft.." first. A much better collection. "Lipidleggin'" alone is worth the price.
But I do love his short stories. "Soft and others" is one of my favorite short story collections. So I figured I'd give this one a shot. I didn't think these stories were quite as good as those in "Soft..." Matter of fact, I like the earlier stories in this book better than his more recent.
Check out "Soft.." first. A much better collection. "Lipidleggin'" alone is worth the price.
February 9, 2011
I love the short story form. It can be very effective when done well and F Paul Wilson rarely disappoints. This is another fine collection of his previously published short fiction written between 1990 and 2005. Some of my favorites include "Foet", "When He Was Fab", "Aryans and Absinthe", and "Anna". I enjoyed nearly all of the pieces except for only a couple. I was a little disappointed in the Repairman Jack story, "Interlude at Duane's". I was also enlightened and entertained the year-by-year background / autobiographical material peppered throughout the book. Too bad this will be his last short story collection.
September 30, 2023
I don't know what it was about me and short story collections a couple of years ago (2010). Is it my attention span? Possibly! Though I hope not.
As usual, I enjoyed Wilson's writing. I was glad to sample him outside of the Adversary Cycle / Repairman Jack series. He is great with plot and great with holding the reader's attention. Dickens he is not. But for a good time, Wilson is the man.
I found it interesting how the volume was laid out chronologically and how each year had an autobiographical position that described what goes on behind a prolific writer's curtain. Answer: lots of work!
As usual, I enjoyed Wilson's writing. I was glad to sample him outside of the Adversary Cycle / Repairman Jack series. He is great with plot and great with holding the reader's attention. Dickens he is not. But for a good time, Wilson is the man.
I found it interesting how the volume was laid out chronologically and how each year had an autobiographical position that described what goes on behind a prolific writer's curtain. Answer: lots of work!
May 27, 2009
19 short stories by one of my favorite authors, and some VERY entertaining anecdotes about the years the stories were written. All said, Wilson is just a great read, even at his least effective. The Repairman Jack series is excellent, as is the Adversary Cycle (I'm not sure why they are seperate items as they are actually the same world...)and this book has some of both. Not as eye-opening as THE BARRENS AND OTHERS, it certainly reads well. I have to recommend it. I read it in a single sitting.
October 26, 2021
Full disclosure here - F. Paul Wilson is currently my favorite author. I discovered him back in the 1980s and got sidetracked somehow and only recently picked up his writing again. This is a delightful autobiographical treatment of his writing career - the when, what, how and why of his writing including his failures and successes up to 2005. The volume also includes several short stories that you may or may not find in other collections depending on the story. You will also find inspiration to pick up some of his other books, so as a marketing tool, this book freaking rules!
September 30, 2011
This is a great collection of stories from one of my all time favorite authors; however, what I found most enjoyable about the book was the biographical timeline F. Paul Wilson had going before each story. It was really interesting to see what was happening in the writer's life while these stories were being created, especially all the details about his different book deals and publishing house adventures / struggles.
May 13, 2009
Not a bad collection of short stories by F. Paul Wilson, some better than others, but all good. I really enjoyed the introduction to each story where he talks about what was going on in his life at the time he wrote the story. My favorite was the Repairman Jack story that was the caboose of the book, but then I've always liked his Repairman Jack series of novels.
July 5, 2009
Although I am not a short story fan, and must be in just the right mood for horror genre, I liked most of these stories, though I skipped the author's introductions.
The first was the best. The Frankenstein story as told by the brain implanted in the monster's head. She remembers her former life and cannot understand why she inhabits this grotesque body in her "nightmares".
The first was the best. The Frankenstein story as told by the brain implanted in the monster's head. She remembers her former life and cannot understand why she inhabits this grotesque body in her "nightmares".
October 10, 2014
Great set of sort stories.
Hate that he has said this will be his last collection.
I loved the spider one, the ending was great.
The repairman jack one was also great.
That is not to say the others were not great, they all were.
A~
Hate that he has said this will be his last collection.
I loved the spider one, the ending was great.
The repairman jack one was also great.
That is not to say the others were not great, they all were.
A~
June 10, 2009
I like F Paul Wilson but this book wasn't great. Some of the short stories were entertaining but none of them blew me away. I don't recommend this book.
August 8, 2012
Favorite short stories: “Please Don’t Hurt Me,” “Sex Slaves of the Dragon Tong,”
“Interlude at Duanes’s.”
“Interlude at Duanes’s.”
January 6, 2012
First book read of 2012 - F. Paul Wilson is always great to read, of course. My favorite collection of his is "Soft and Others" but this had some great stories. "Foet" is a classic.
May 16, 2012
This is an amazing short story collection from a man who knows his craft. The stories are compelling, original, and truly inspired me as a short story writer. Well done, all of them.
July 11, 2012
I enjoyed almost all of the short stories in this collection, especially the follow-up to the Halloween story I'd read quite a while back. They're creepy and sometimes gross, but always entertaining.
August 7, 2012
A very satisfying collection of short stories with fascinating notes of how an author spends his time when not writing.
http://opionator.wordpress.com/2012/0...
http://opionator.wordpress.com/2012/0...
October 5, 2013
some good stories here,aftershock was definitely the best,the barrens was a much better collection
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews