The Last Rakosh is effectively an epilogue to The Tomb, a short story/novella in which Repairman Jack runs across an old acquaintance at a travelling freak show a year after the events in The Tomb. F. Paul Wilson does a great job of tying up loose ends without actually tying up any loose ends, and manages to throw a nod to another Repairman Jack novel into the mix. A great little addition to an excellent series. ( )

The Last Rakosh was a fun pulp novella featuring Repairman Jack. I’m not overly familiar with the Repairman Jack character, having only read one of the books, but I found him to be a compelling and fun character to be around. In this novel, Jack goes to a carnival and encounters a creature he thought to be extinct. The Rakosh is a combination of a gorilla and a shark, and is absolutely fearsome. Jack had a run in with them previously and this one in particular, and thought he had killed the last of them. Fortunately, he hadn’t or we wouldn’t have had this novella.

This was a quick read—longer than a short story but shorter than a novel—that tells of Jack’s run in with the rakosh. Oddly enough, the humans in the carnival came off as more villainous than the rakosh. Still, to protect the ones he loves, Jack must hunt down and try to kill the creature in the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, a great location for a horror novel. Given Jack’s battle with this creature, it made me wonder how could he have possibly killed them to begin with. Nonetheless, this was a fun tale, not overly deep, but satisfying in a pulp fiction kind of way.

Carl Alves -author of Conjesero ( )

A short story concerning the surviving Rakoshi from The Tomb. Jack stumbles across the Rakosh at a side-show/freak show. What should Jack do? He thinks, obviously, that he should kill, but has second thoughts when he sees how it looks. But...

Not too bad of a story. ( )