Born May 17, 1946 and raised in New Jersey, Francis Paul Wilson knew almost from the start that he wanted to be a doctor. While preparing himself for that laudable goal, he managed to find the time to be influenced by such disparate sources as comics, the writings of authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, and the music of Chuck Berry and Alan Freed. He didn't realize it immediately, but he was one of those individuals blessed (or cursed) with a second true calling. Though he didn't start out wanting to be a writer, he knew he liked to write, and he would eventually discover that he could make a living for himself doing something fun, in addition to his medical career.
When he was in the second grade, Wilson told his teacher he'd written a ghost story, and was asked to read it aloud as his contribution to the class's reading circle. He'd only written half of it, and the teacher caught him ad-libbing the rest, suggesting he finish it up and read the rest to them on another date. Then a miraculous thing happened. While putting up the chairs from the reading circle, he received some of the highest praise a writer can receive: a couple of the other kids came up to ask him what happened next. He knew he had them hooked, and a full-blown storyteller was born in him that day.
Eventually, writing became a kind of compulsive disorder with him. Even when he practiced medicine full-time, he wrote every day, setting himself minimum goals of 3 pages per day, though he'd push it as far as 100 pages a month whenever he could. In 1994, he cut down his medical practice to two days a week (being a doctor, after all, is still his first calling), and continues to write just as compulsively. And it has paid off for him. He's produced over twenty-five novels, countless short stories and non- or semi-fiction essays, and even a couple of plays. There are over six million copies of his books in print in the United States, and his various works have been translated into twenty-four languages. He has evolved with the times as well, diving into interactive fiction for the Sci-Fi Channel and interactive CD-ROMs, and even bringing forth a website centered around his most beloved of characters, Repairman Jack (www.repairmanjack.com). He is a regular poster on the Repairman Jack Message Board, interacting freely with his broad fan base.
Dr. Wilson's works throughout 1980s and early 1990s stuck him with the label of "horror writer," but he prefers to think of himself as a writer of thrillers. His earlier work from the 1970s consists primarily of science fiction thrillers, while much of his work from the later 1990s exemplify the medical thriller genre. His Repairman Jack series, which started with the supernatural thriller The Tomb, combines all of these genres and more, often within the same novel.
Noders in the United Kingdom seeking his works might do well to check the top of the beginning of the top shelf in the bookstore, rather than the lower right where the "W" authors usually hide. When he sold the non-horror novel The Select, he decided to do so under a pseudonym to keep publishers from looking at it in the same light as his other works, much the same way Stephen King wrote as Richard Bachman. He chose "Colin Andrews" out of the simple desire to be closer to the beginning of the alphabet.
Bibliography
- The Adversary Cycle
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- Repairman Jack
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- LaNague series
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- Other Novels
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- Short Stories
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- "The Cleaning Machine" (Startling Mystery Stories #18, March 1971)
- "Higher Centers" (Analog, April 1971)
- "The Man With The Anteater" (Analog, July 1971)
- "Ratman" (Analog, August 1971)
- "He Shall be John" (Fiction #4, 1973)
- "Lipidleggin'" (Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, May-June 1978)
- "To Fill The Sea and Air" (Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February 1979)
- "Demonsong" (Heroic Fantasy, 1979)
- "Green Winter" (Analog, January 5, 1981)
- "Be Fruitful and Multiply" (Perpetual Light, 1982)
- "Soft" (Masques, 1984)
- "The Last ONE MO' ONCE GOLDEN OLDIES REVIVAL" (Whispers V, 1985)
- "Dat-Tay-Vao" (Amazing Stories, March 1987) - Bram Stoker Award finalist
- "Traps" (Night Cry, Summer 1987) - Bram Stoker Award finalist
- "The Years the Music Died" (Whispers VI, 1987)
- "The Death of Balajuro" (Footsteps VII, 1987) - Excerpted from Black Wind
- "Doc Johnson" (Doom City, 1987)
- "Cuts" (Silver Scream, 1988)
- "Muscles" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1988)
- "Buckets" (Soft & Others, 1989)
- "The Tenth Toe" (Razored Saddles, 1989)
- "Definitive Therapy" (The Further Adventures of the Joker, 1990)
- "Rumors" (Double Century, 1990)
- "Rockabilly" (Dick Tracy: The Secret Files, 1990)
- "The Last Rakosh" (The World Fantasy Convention 1990 Program Book, 1990) - Incorporated into All the Rage
- "Topsy" (Obsessions, 1991)
- "An Evening in the Park" (Mystery Scene #29, 1991) - Excerpted from Nightworld
- "Home Repairs" (Cold Blood, 1991) - incorporated into Conspiracies
- "Memoirs of the Effster: the Summer of '73" (Mystery Scene #30, 1991)
- "Dreams" (The Ultimate Frankenstein, 1991)
- "The November Game" (The Bradbury Chronicles, 1991)
- "Please Don't Hurt Me" (Masques IV, 1991)
- "Foet" (Borderlands 2, 1991)
- "Bob Dylan, Troy Jonson, and the Speed Queen" (Shock Rock, 1992)
- "The Long Way Home" (Dark at Heart, 1992)
- "Nyro Fiddles" (In Dreams, 1992)
- "When He Was Fab" (Weird Tales #305, Winter 1992/1993)
- "Sunday in New York" (Thunder's Shadow, 1993)
- "Slasher" (Predators, 1993)
- "Itsy Bitsy Spider" (Great Authors and their Great Kids, 1995) - with Meggan C. Wilson
- "Offshore" (Diagnosis: Terminal, 1996)
- "Lysing Toward Bethlehem" (Imagination Fully Dilated, 1998)
- "Good Friday" (The Last Book of Supernatural Horror and Suspense, 1999) - prequel to "The Lord's Work"
- "Night Drive" (Cemetary Dance #32, November 1999)
- "Anna" (Imagination Fully Dilated 2, 2000)
- "Performance" (Bad News, edited by Richard Laymon, 2000)
- Comic Scripts
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- Novelettes and Novelas
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- "Wheels Within Wheels" (Analog, September 1971)
- "Pard" (Analog, December 1972)
- "The Tery" (Binary Star #2, 1979) - Expanded from "He Shall Be John"
- "Dydeetown Girl (Far Frontiers IV, 1986) - Nebula Award finalist
- "Menage a Trois" (Weird Tales #290, Spring 1988) - prequel to Sibs
- "Wires" (New Destinies IV, 1988)
Night Visions VI, 1988)
- "Tenants" (Night Visions VI, 1988)
- "Feelings" (Night Visions VI, 1988)
- "Kids" (New Destinies VII, 1989)
- "A Day in the Life" (Stalkers, 1989)
- "The Barrens" (Lovecraft's Legacy, 1990) - World Fantasy Award finalist
- "Midnight Mass" (Axolotl Press #16, 1990)
- "Pelts" (Footsteps Press chapbook, 1990) - Bram Stoker Award finalist
- "Bugs" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1992) - adapted from Nightworld
- "The Lord's Work" (Dracula: Prince of Darkness, 1992)
- "Dcraofvpiipedel" (David Copperfield's Tales of the Impossible, 1995)
- "The Wringer" (Night Screams, 1996)
- "Aryans and Absinthe" (Revelations, 1997)
- "Aftershock" (Realms of Fantasy Volume 6 #2, December 1999) - Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction
- SIMS - Part 1: "La Causa", 2000
- SIMS - Part 2: "The Portero Method", 2001
- SIMS - Part 3: "Meerm", 2002
- SIMS - Part 4: "Zero", 2002
- SIMS - Part 5: "Thy Brother's Keeper", 2003
- Short Story Collections
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- Dramatic Works
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- Interactive Fiction
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- Bombmeister (1995), with Matt Costello - film, never released
- Derelict (1997), with Matt Costello - interactive script and design for the web, can be found on the Sci-Fi Channel web site <http://www.scifi.com/pulp/set/derelict/>
- Disney's Mathquest with Aladdin (1997), with Matt Costello - Interactive script and design for CD-ROM
- The Dark Half (currently vaporware), with Matt Costello - interactive script and design for CD-ROM based on the Stephen King novel
- Other Fiction
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- Non-Fiction
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- "Lamont Cranston was NOT the Shadow!" (Reminiscing Time, 1969) - semi-fiction
- "Requiem for a Giant" (Reason, December 1973)
- "And Now, From the People Who Brought You Viet Nam and Watergate..." (Analog guest editorial, April 1975)
- "Literary Darwinism" (Patchin Review #4, Spring 1982)
- "Of Gold, Weed, and Lenny" (Prometheus #4, Fall 1983) - transcript of remarks at the 1983 Prometheus Awards
- "Look What They've Done To my Song, Ma" (Science Fiction Review, Summer 1984)
- "TZ Terror" (The Twilight Zone Magazine, December 1985) - semi-fiction
- "On 'Dydeetown Girl'" (The Bulletin of SFWA #95, Spring 1987)
- "The Exorcist" (Horror: The 100 Best Books, 1988)
- "Dydeetown World" (Mystery Scene #21, May-June 1989)
- "Twenty Years with Reborn" (Mystery Scene #25, March-April 1990)
- "Red Dragon" (Scream Factory #7, July 1991) - essay
- "Re: Reprisal" (From the Tunnel, July 1991) - essay
- "The Birth of Sibs" (Mystery Scene #32, December 1991 - January 1992)
- "All Hell Breaks Loose" (From the Tunnel, July 1992)
- "The Glowing Hand" (Dancing with the Dark, 1997) - memoir
- "About 'The Barrens'" (Mythos Online - The Internet Magazine of Lovecraftian Horror, August 1997) - <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/4162/>
- "That's Why They Call It the Blues" (CD Liner notes for "Hey-Hey" by Stringbean and the Stalkers, 1998)
- "Fat" (Dystopia, 2000)
- "The Beast and Me" (2001) - memoir
Sources
Wilson, F. Paul. The Official Repairman Jack Web Site. <http://www.repairmanjack.com> (February 28, 2003)