Scenes from the Secret History (The Secret History of the World) by F. Paul Wilson Page A
Authors: F. Paul Wilson
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lore and relics of the First Age.
Back in 2006 my grandson, a precocious reader, wanted to read my Repairman Jack novels. But they weren’t for him – the language and situations weren’t appropriate for a seven-year old. Still, I wanted to share Jack with him. The only solution I could see was to tell a few young adult Jack stories to hold him over until he was old enough for the adult books.
So I decided to go back to 1983 when Jack is fourteen years old. It’s a magical time in his life, the last summer before high school when he’s discovering his fixing talent. I’ve set it on the edge of the mysterious and legendary New Jersey Pine Barrens where strange lights jump from tree to tree and the Jersey Devil supposedly roams. I peopled it with weird characters and places and pitched the idea to Tor. They hooked me up with one of their teen editors and gave me a contract for 3 so-called Young-Adult novels.
I say "so-called" because the writing process wasn't much different from my adult work and the style is virtually identical. I've striven over the years for a clean, lean style, tailored to the pace of the thrillers I write. To my delight I found it fits a younger audience equally well. At least that's what a focus group showed: Kids who often took up to a month to finish a book were polishing off Jack: Secret Histories over a weekend and looking for more.
Jack: Secret Histories made a number of recommended lists for middle-grade readers.
Here’s how the first book opens…
Jack: Secret Histories
(sample)
MONDAY
They discovered the body on a rainy afternoon
1
“Aren’t we there yet ?” Eddie said, puffing behind him.
Jack glanced over his shoulder to where Eddie Connell labored through the sandy soil on his bike. His face was red and beaded with perspiration, sweat soaked through his red Police T-shirt, darkening Sting’s face. Chunky Eddie wasn’t built for speed. He wore his sandy hair shorter than most, which tended to make him look even heavier than he was. Eddie’s idea of exercise was a day on the couch playing Pole Position on his… new Atari 5200. Jack envied that machine. He was stuck with a 2600.
“Only Weezy knows,” Jack said.
He wasn’t sweating like Eddie, but he felt clammy all over. With good reason. The August heat was stifling here in the Pine Barrens, and the humidity made it worse. Whatever breeze existed out there couldn’t penetrate the close-packed, spindly trees.
They were following Eddie’s older sister Weezy – really Louise, but no one ever called her that. She liked to remind people that she’d been “Weezy” long before The Jeffersons ever showed up on the tube.
She was pedaling her banana-seat Schwinn along one of the firebreak trails that crisscrossed the million-plus acres of mostly uninhabited woodland known as the Jersey Pine Barrens. A potentially dangerous place if you didn’t know what you were doing or where you were going. Every year hunters wandered in, looking for deer, and were never seen again. Locals would wink and say the Jersey Devil snagged another one. But Jack knew the JD was just a folk tale. Well, he was pretty sure. Truth was, the missing hunters were usually amateurs who came ill equipped and got lost, wandering around in circles until they died of thirst and starvation.
At least that was what people said. Though that didn’t explain why so few of the bodies were ever found.
But the Barrens didn’t scare Jack and Eddie and Weezy. At least not during the day. They’d grown up on the edge of the Pinelands and knew this section of it like the backs of their hands. Couldn’t know all of it, of course. The Barrens hid places no human eye had ever seen.
Yet as familiar as he was with the area, Jack still got a creepy sensation when riding into the trees and seeing the forty-foot scrub pines get thicker and thicker, crowding the edges of
Back in 2006 my grandson, a precocious reader, wanted to read my Repairman Jack novels. But they weren’t for him – the language and situations weren’t appropriate for a seven-year old. Still, I wanted to share Jack with him. The only solution I could see was to tell a few young adult Jack stories to hold him over until he was old enough for the adult books.
So I decided to go back to 1983 when Jack is fourteen years old. It’s a magical time in his life, the last summer before high school when he’s discovering his fixing talent. I’ve set it on the edge of the mysterious and legendary New Jersey Pine Barrens where strange lights jump from tree to tree and the Jersey Devil supposedly roams. I peopled it with weird characters and places and pitched the idea to Tor. They hooked me up with one of their teen editors and gave me a contract for 3 so-called Young-Adult novels.
I say "so-called" because the writing process wasn't much different from my adult work and the style is virtually identical. I've striven over the years for a clean, lean style, tailored to the pace of the thrillers I write. To my delight I found it fits a younger audience equally well. At least that's what a focus group showed: Kids who often took up to a month to finish a book were polishing off Jack: Secret Histories over a weekend and looking for more.
Jack: Secret Histories made a number of recommended lists for middle-grade readers.
Here’s how the first book opens…
Jack: Secret Histories
(sample)
MONDAY
They discovered the body on a rainy afternoon
1
“Aren’t we there yet ?” Eddie said, puffing behind him.
Jack glanced over his shoulder to where Eddie Connell labored through the sandy soil on his bike. His face was red and beaded with perspiration, sweat soaked through his red Police T-shirt, darkening Sting’s face. Chunky Eddie wasn’t built for speed. He wore his sandy hair shorter than most, which tended to make him look even heavier than he was. Eddie’s idea of exercise was a day on the couch playing Pole Position on his… new Atari 5200. Jack envied that machine. He was stuck with a 2600.
“Only Weezy knows,” Jack said.
He wasn’t sweating like Eddie, but he felt clammy all over. With good reason. The August heat was stifling here in the Pine Barrens, and the humidity made it worse. Whatever breeze existed out there couldn’t penetrate the close-packed, spindly trees.
They were following Eddie’s older sister Weezy – really Louise, but no one ever called her that. She liked to remind people that she’d been “Weezy” long before The Jeffersons ever showed up on the tube.
She was pedaling her banana-seat Schwinn along one of the firebreak trails that crisscrossed the million-plus acres of mostly uninhabited woodland known as the Jersey Pine Barrens. A potentially dangerous place if you didn’t know what you were doing or where you were going. Every year hunters wandered in, looking for deer, and were never seen again. Locals would wink and say the Jersey Devil snagged another one. But Jack knew the JD was just a folk tale. Well, he was pretty sure. Truth was, the missing hunters were usually amateurs who came ill equipped and got lost, wandering around in circles until they died of thirst and starvation.
At least that was what people said. Though that didn’t explain why so few of the bodies were ever found.
But the Barrens didn’t scare Jack and Eddie and Weezy. At least not during the day. They’d grown up on the edge of the Pinelands and knew this section of it like the backs of their hands. Couldn’t know all of it, of course. The Barrens hid places no human eye had ever seen.
Yet as familiar as he was with the area, Jack still got a creepy sensation when riding into the trees and seeing the forty-foot scrub pines get thicker and thicker, crowding the edges of
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