For more than a decade F. Paul Wilson has crafted a significant role and body of work as a horror writer. Since his switch from science fiction to horror in the early 1980s, the critical acclaim within the horror field has worked to build his reputation toward the threshold of genuine fame and general recognition.

Many of Wilson’s horror novels reached the general market as paperbacks after first going through the specialty press in expensive and finely printed hardcover editions. In 1984 Whispers Press published the first repairman Jack novel, The Tomb.

Dark Harvest, one of the foremost small press publishers of the last decade, published Reborn, Reprisal, and Nightworld, a trilogy that loosely links with The Tomb. The Keep and The Touch to form a six volume epic called the Adversary Cycle. Dark Harvest also in 1991 published the erotic thriller Sibs, just this May released in mass-market paperback.

Wilson’s first mass-market hardcover since 1986’s The Tomb focuses like that novel on a medical theme. In contrast to the mystical overtones of The Touch, the 1994 novel The Select is almost mainstream. A true medical thriller, it is one of his best works to date: tense, well-crafted and decidedly libertarian in tone and expression. Showing his versatility as a writer, Wilson delves into the humanitarian heart and mind to find scary themes while stretching the horror label.

In The Select, Quinn Cleary eagerly and desperately wants to become a doctor. Her only setback: relative poverty. Her stipends and scholarships that financed her way through undergraduate pre-med won’t extend into med school, and her only choice seems to be to deep debit or service to the Navy in return for her training. Then there’s the other choice: acceptance into the elite and prestigious, and free to all accepted students, Ingraham College, a highly financed far-reaching research facility and medical school.

After a strange and grueling entrance exam and long wait Quinn makes it into the Ingraham, along with a friend and fellow student. Once inside, the ever curious and suspicious Quinn begins to note certain strange new behaviors and thoughts among her fellow students and the institute set-up.

To Quinn, the tight security seems way overdone and dire hints and events propel her to discoveries that in turn threaten her life. When her friend/lover, fellow student vanishes, Quinn uncovers the true secret behind the generous nature of the Ingraham.

The libertarian touches are strongly evident in this novel. Wilson’s opinions on centralized medical care, as voiced by Quinn, make the case that such care would instead be stripped of all human compassion in the true meaning of “care.” The debate over the proper use of scarce medical resources is a potent contemporary dilemma, constantly in the news today with Clinton’s crusade on universal health care.

The Select is a tight, compact thriller that kept me unnerved and on edge throughout, hands shaking in anticipation as the novel seemed to a close. Highly recommended.

In his foreword, Orson Card declares that many collaborative works are actually written by the better-known of their authors, but in this case he and Kathryn Kidd really did write Lovelock together.

Nonetheless, the novel lacks Card’s fictional voice that compels intellectual-and full-of-surprises minds that his fans love so well. The style here is unadorned and considering the narrator, that is entirely reasonable.

The novel’s setting is the Ark, a colony ship on a faster-than-light journey from Earth to transform and colonize a new planet. The narrator, Lovelock, is an enhanced monkey, engineered with software and genetics to be utterly devoted to a famous gaiologist, who will be in charge of creating a planetary ecology in their new home. To his owner he is a servant, a pet, a thing to be patronized and a means to an end—utilized mostly as a “witness,” recording the events around the famous scientist, but also helping her with her research.

During the journey, Lovelock becomes more and more aware that he has been programmed to be a slave, and he becomes determined to break that programming and free himself. In the process he becomes far more intelligent and sensible than most of the other characters in this novel.

The book, in many ways, is an account of the programming almost everyone has received: “Who am I to question?” “The government must know best.” “If humans were meant to fly [or explore space, they’d have been created with wings [with rockets up their backsides]” “Others among the colonists learn that the emotional slavery they have created in their relationships with others can be eradicated. The first book of this trilogy is a tribute to all those who have fought against the boundaries of what they have been taught, and have learned to think for themselves.

I already hesitate to recommend the first of a trilogy; who knows what the next two books will be like? On the other hand, Card is committed to professionalism, and I’ve read enough of his work to note the libertarian direction it often takes. Therefore I feel confident that the next two books will at least be interesting. The story-line so far is very libertarian and should continue in that direction. The ending is a little abrupt, but there is an ending, and it works. I can’t wait to read the second and third parts.