In the Young Repairman Jack series, Jack is a fourteen-year-old boy living in a small town near the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. The Pine Barrens is known for being odd, both the location and the people who live in there are a bit different than normal. In this first entry in the series, Jack and his friends uncover a body and before you know it they are wrapped up in a conspiracy that's killing local members of the community. Oh, and Jack has to help one of his friends who has become a teenage alcoholic. Each of the books in this young-adult-oriented series has a side plot that's related to issues that teenagers may face in the real world, even as Jack's main plot touches upon the Secret History of the World that will consume his life as an adult.

Jack and his friends find a strange artifact in the Pine Barrens. It's linked to a much smaller artifact they discovered in the first novel. Also, a young boy has gone missing and now Jack has to find out how the Ancient Septimus Fraternal Order is linked to the missing boy and the cage-like artifact hidden in the Pine Barrens. In this book, Jack's major side quest is to reveal that his dead friend's father is an abusive man, despite being an upstanding citizen of the community (domestic violence situation).

The Septimus Order turns out to be a major player (on the side of evil, naturally) in later Repairman Jack novels.

Skipping ahead a few years, Jack has arrived in New York City, eager to make his way in the world, but also determined to be invisible on any official record. No birth certificate, no social security number, nothing that can identify him to the authorities. He discovers he has a talent for solving problems for people when they can't go to the authorities. Meanwhile, terrorists are plotting a major activity to cause maximum chaos, unknowingly working for the Big Bad of the entire series.

There's very little supernatural going on in this subseries of the The Secret History of the World, but if you've read the later books, you can see the subtle signs of the Ally and the Adversary all over the place.

There's another time skip between the last book and this book. It's been a couple of years and Jack is now officially known as "Repairman Jack" thanks to his friend Abe's advertising campaign. This book resolves a major subplot introduced in the first book. Jack also becomes involved with a couple of colorful characters whose mission in life is to make kiddie diddlers disappear--permanently. The terrorists from the first book are still pissed about the money they lost when Jack foiled their human trafficking scheme, so they are looking to find him.

This concludes Repairman Jack: The Early Years. The terrorists from the first couple of books have now settled on their main target in New York City--the World Trade Center. It's 1993 and their plan is to blow up a truck of explosives under one of the building, hoping to make it unstable enough to topple over into the other building. This is what *really* happened (in the fictional universe of The Secret History of the World), as opposed to what was released in the newspapers.

In an afterword, F. Paul Wilson notes that the real details of the events of the first World Trade Center bombing were unbelievable enough that many people probably wouldn't accept them as fact. "Fiction has to make sense." -- Mark Twain.

This is a standalone novel within The Secret History of the World, though it takes place in Jack's New York City, as there are a few references to places that are located in those stories. It's only tangentially related to the main metaplot. At first I thought this was going to be something of a psychological thriller, but there are paranormal events that can be linked to the Otherness that is the main antagonist when you read between the lines. Kara is investigating her twin sister Kelly's unusual death and discovers the truth is far, far darker than anyone suspects.

This is the first published Repairman Jack novel. As such, it exhibits some early installment weirdness, as F. Paul Wilson didn't know at the time that Jack would become a franchise character. He was originally meant to be a one-shot character, but the end of the book is ambiguous enough to allow for Jack's return. It's also jarring to read it after reading the rest of the books in the series, because Wilson did quite a bit of retconning with details of Jack's life. Canonically, Jack was born in 1969 (it's well-established in later books), but in The Tomb, which takes place in the mid-1980s, Jack is 34 years old. His siblings also have different career paths than the ones established in later books. It's not a bad book, but it feels "off" because of the discontinuity between the facts of Jack's life laid out here versus those that are more conistently portrayed in later books.

Wilson didn't even want to call this book The Tomb because there's really not a tomb anywhere to be found in the story. However, the publisher insisted on the title because it was similar to The Keep, which *was* about an actual keep that played a major role in the story. If anything The Curse would have been a much better title because THAT'S the main focus of the plot--a curse placed upon the Westphalen family when their British ancestors defiled an Indian temple in the mid-nineteenth century.