Repairman Jack: Conspiracies, or the End of the World is Tesla's Fault

Some days I like My Little Pony and kittens. Other days, I like Red Lanterns, Repairman Jack, and grenades. Earlier in the week I finished Conspiracies, the third Repairman Jack book (out of 15), and according to my brother, shit is now getting real.

Conspiracies is exactly what it sounds like - Jack is hired by Lew Ehler, whose wife has gone missing right before she was supposed to deliver a keynote address at the first annual convention of the Society for the Exposure of Secret Organizations and Unacknowledged Phenomena (SESOUP). SESOUP is full of the sort of people who make Agent Fox Mulder seem normal and everyone has a theory on Melanie Ehler's disappearance. Jack infiltrates this group as an "experiencer" - someone who has had a supernatural experience, resulting in missing hours of his life. Wilson does a great job of introducing Jack to the half dozen or so major types of crazy - from gov't conspiracy to antichrist nuts and everything in between - without writing any of it like a big old info dump. 

One of the best episodes in the whole series.

Jack walks into the SESOUP conference a skeptic, despite his battle with the rakoshi in The Tomb. In fact, he's trying to forget the rakoshi thing ever happened, so when he starts having lucid rakoshi nightmares, he gets freaked out. Jack fumbles around for a while, not making a lot of headway on finding Melanie Ehler, but in this downtime, Wilson puts us inside the mind of Sal Roma, the leader of SESOUP, and his pet Capuchin monkey, Mauricio. They talk to each other. It's freaky. 

I will fuck your shit up so hard!

Without spoiling too much, Wilson introduces readers to the Otherness - more a concept than a thing, that encompasses the idea of chaos with a little madness and hopelessness thrown in. The rakoshi were children of the Otherness and Jack has been marked by them. The Otherness wants him for destroying its children, and this is a fight Jack will continue with through the rest of the series. 

"Hey Quinn, check out my bitchin' Tesla Coil!"

I liked this book a lot. I'm all for overarching end of the world scenarios, but what really made it was Wilson's inclusion of Nikola Tesla. That's right, bitches - the root of the series and all of Jack's problems boil down to that badass Tesla and his Wardenclyff Towers (including an explanation to the decimation of the Tunguska Forest - but any Tesla fan knows it was him all along). Mr. TwoMonkeys and I are Tesla nuts. We traveled out to Goat Head Island on the Canadian border on our honeymoon to visit the larger than life-size monument to the man and the massive power plant dedicated to him. But back to Jack - this isn't his first brush with the genius of Tesla. Legacies was all about the rights to broadcast power - Tesla's greatest dream (that never happened).

Someday, this will end the world.

These books were awesome before Tesla got involved. But now I can't wait to see how it all plays out. Tesla, bitches!