Reborn

Wilson keeps up the high standards of Black Wind (1988) - without quite producing a breakthrough success-with this clone of Rosemary's Baby. lt's set in the same period, the late 60's, and has some of Ira Levin's seductively understated plotting. But until the climax, Wilson largely holds back from horror effects and restrains his cosmic cymbals for rare dramatic moments. Jim Stevens, a likable, four-square, questioning, Dan Ratherish features writer and unsuccessful young horror novelist, receives a letter telling him that he is an inheritor of the late Dr. Roderick Hanley, one of the richest men in Monroe Village. Jim is an orphan, and Hanley a Nobel-winning geneticist. Jim instantly intuits their connection - he is Hanley's natural child. But it turns out that he is not such a natural child. Just before WW II Hanley oversaw a project as secret as the Manhattan Project: his was an effort in genetic engineering that hoped to produce the perfect soldier to fight Hitler. As an experiment, Hanley introduced his own genes into a host ovum that had had its nucleus removed: the child that resulted had no mother's genes and was essentially a clone of Hanley. Then Hanley had second thoughts about his child being raised as a test-tube freak and secretly gave the baby to an orphanage. Since then, an underground Christian group has arisen to fight the Antichrist, who is about to be reborn, and it focuses on Jim Stevens as that Antichrist. Stevens must be destroyed. And rather shockingly the novel's hero does die in an accident about halfway through-but was he the Antichrist? The story then focuses on his pregnant wife Carol, who fights to bring her baby to term - but is the baby itself, then, the Antichrist? Well, ask Rosemary - she knows all about this. Generally absorbing, with a brilliantly ghoulish climax. (Kirkus Reviews)