With the recent, and long-awaited, released of the fourth “Secrets of the Nine” novel, The Monster on Hold from Meteor House, we also got a new novella by Frank Schildiner that ties in: It’s Always Darkest.
Hopefully folks here are familiar with Schildiner, as I’ve reviewed several of his works.
The Secrets of the Nine series was created by Philip José Farmer, and tells of a world where a group of nine immortals secretly control the world. And unlike stories of seven or nine mystic and enlightened leaders, we have a sinister group of primitives who control people through their baser instincts. They had recruited into their ranks Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban. These are analogs/pastiches of Tarzan and Doc Savage. And we learn they are half brothers and that their grandfather is a member of the Nine. In the prior works, they rebelled against the Nine and started a war to wipe them out. By the end of the last one written by Farmer, they had killed three more of the members, who had already lost one.
It’s Always Darkest focuses on another member of the Nine’s group who decides to also rebel, but instead of going after the Nine themselves, as Grandrith and Caliban are, he will go after their network of criminal organizations. This individual is Langston Dupont, who is an analoge to The Shadow. We learn that he was a spy and aviator in WWI, like The Shadow was. But his origin and story are a little different. He actually has a closer connection to the Nine than either Grandrith or Caliban, and was trained by them to be their ultimate killer. But he doesn’t have an alias like The Shadow, nor a cadre of agents, though he has some underworld contacts and informants.
His target are the leaders of the various criminal organizations under Seiko Midori, who is about 300 years old, and a former lover of Langston’s. She is kind of his Shiwan Khan. Dupont will also go up against a master swordsman who trained him, and is even older than she is. Will he succeed?
We also get several detailed fight scenes. And as Schildinger is himself a martial-arts expert, I am sure his descriptions are accurate. I’m not in a good position to judge this.
As this story is set around the time of Lord of the Trees and Mad Goblin, and way before the events of Monster on Hold, you may want to read it before Monster. I did. Will we get more stories set in this universe? No idea, but I hope so.
