William Hall

John Scalzi thanks and acknowledges Robert A. Heinlein at the end of this book and I can understand why. Although I've never read Heinlein's Starship Troopers (I must correct that at some point), the movie based on his story is one of my favorites. I couldn't help but think of the film Starship Troopers while reading this book. But what a clever twist on the interstellar warfare theme where old people get a chance for a new life by joining the Colonial Defense Force fighters for not less than 2 and very likely a 10 year hitch, and where the vast majority of them will never survive to the end of their term of service. And, if they do manage to survive they may never return to Earth again. The description of advanced technologies both biological and technological (kept secret from the general Earth population by the CDF) along with fantastical descriptions of various intelligent alien enemy races is fascinating, but the story told from the viewpoint of 75 year old widower John Perry and his experiences from raw recruit to blooded veteran contains a lot of heart also. For instance, what would ensue from a chance encounter with your dead wife who really isn't your wife? There is never a dull moment in this page-turner.

This was my first introduction to Philip Fracassi's writing. These short Horror stories were very well written in the style of Stephen King with well developed characters and truly horrific imaginative ideas. Like Stephen King, Fracassi understands the world of children and young people in the stories where such characters are the main protagonists. Perhaps my favorites in this anthology are “Altar,” “The Baby Farmer,” “Mother,” “Fail-Safe,” and “Mandala.” Many of the characters, like most people, are flawed. Some have drinking problems, some have fallen into infidelity, some are careless or non-caring, some are susceptible or broken, but they could be you or someone you know living everyday lives until the “dark” reaches out and grabs them. In Fracassi's Horror universe monsters may not always be supernatural and both human and supernatural acts of horror may coexist within the parameters of the story. In most cases the final outcome is dire or left open to the reader's imagination, but Fracassi does allow for redemption in the final, nail-biting tale “Mandala.” A truly satisfying Horror anthology read.

This was a short, quick Science Fiction read. While the plot and characters were interesting, the story never broke any new ground for me, an avid Sci-Fi reader. Some of the plot points and characters reminded me of the streaming series The Expanse (I haven't read the books). The four main characters are Saga, Michel, Wei and Gregor. Wei (the corporate connection) and her pilot Gregor (a belter) have hired hacker husband and wife team Michel and Saga to go with them on their ship, the Sigurd, to the abandoned huge luxury space-liner, the Martian Queen, on an illegal salvage mission. The ship floats in the space lanes somewhere around the outer planets in the solar system and Michel and Saga consider it will be a big score if they can carry off the mission. But nothing seems to go right once Michel and Saga have entered and breached the ship's systems. Saga receives the heartbreaking news that her mother has died out of her reach back on Earth and being able to afford new treatments for her mother's illness was the main reason she had agreed to do the mission. Following this tragic news, Saga's grief and guilt puts a strain on her relationship with Michel. Saga and Michel soon learn that Wei has been keeping secrets about the Martian Queen mission from them while at the same time Wei becomes ever more paranoid and controlling. Gregor is a melancholy alcoholic who wanders the corridors of the ship and stays in a state of inebriation once he comes across some leftover liquor in the ship's bar. Weird things begin to accelerate aboard the supposedly abandoned ship with its creepy reanimated server bots and when Gregor is found dead and then appears to be resurrected for a deadly purpose, tensions mount. Finally, as the danger continues to spiral out of control Saga will be forced to make a life-changing decision in order to save the lives of her husband and Wei and stop a threat that could endanger the lives of everyone in the solar system.

This was a short read of three horror short stories and my introduction to Adam Nevill's writing. The main connection running throughout the three stories deals with creepy haunted houses. The first story “Where Angels Come In” doesn't have much to do with angels, but has Lovecraftian undertones in that the main protagonist has been touched and horribly damaged by his encounter with something not of this world that is centered on a cursed house in his town. He relates his horrific tale to another damaged survivor of an encounter with the house, an old crone. The second story “The Ancestors” is for those creeped out by tales of haunted dolls and toys. It is told from the perspective of a little girl whose down-on-their-luck parents have moved into a house, ignorant of what evil lies within. The spirit within the house plays upon the innocence of the child who at night is drawn into the world of evil by a creepy, otherworldly playmate who seems to be the leader of an animated toy assembly. This is no happy “Toy Story” tale. The third story “Florrie” is a tale of possession in which a young man's dreams of renovating the old fixer upper he has just purchased will simply not be allowed to come to fruition by the spirit of the former owner who likes things just the way they are. These stories were quite chilling with definite beginnings, middles and ends, but also leave the reader with open-ended questions that make such writing so weirdly satisfying for those who enjoy horror.

The Fisherman wraps a horror tale within a horror tale. What occurred in the past comes full circle to intrude into the present day. This story is definitely within the Lovecraftian horror genre where horrible monstrous things in another realm are separated from this realm by only the thinnest of veils and those with forbidden knowledge may seek to open a doorway into that other realm. In the past such a doorway was opened in a village work camp that was covered over and buried long ago under a reservoir of water formed from the work camp's dam project. It's a place where horrors occurred after a visiting stranger moved into the valley near the work camp and began doing strange things with ropes along the soon to be dammed river. In present day the path to the other side can be found by following a hard-to-find obscure stream in the Catskill mountains sourced from the reservoir. Fishermen who seek out this hidden stream are liable to find more than fish and possibly a fate worse than death. But the story doesn't just deal with horror but with the heartbreak of personal loss and how the main characters attempt to cope with that loss. Langan spins an intricate, well-told creepy tale.

Science Fiction and Horror are my favorite go to reads. I especially like reading classic weird/horror around spooky season. This B&N leatherbound classic contains the original Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The String of Pearls; or, The Tale of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street along with many other weird/horror short stories. Unless you read the originals, never think you know these wonderful classic tales. And, the leatherbound edition looks great on the bookshelf.

This book was an exciting page turner from beginning to end. The writing style and story subject matter reminded me of some of the best writings of Michael Crichton and Dean Koontz. There is much speculative scientific talk nowadays about quantum physics and the possible existence of alternate realities or parallel universes. Well, Science Fiction has been talking about these mirror realities/universes long before quantum theory came on to the scene, but this story takes a refreshing and scary new take on the subject. What starts out as a kidnapping of the main character, leads to the character's tortured and horrific search through countless versions of his reality in an attempt to find his way back to his wife and son in the one true reality (Do you remember the TV series Sliders?). And, the thrills continue non-stop with a wild chase as the story rushes towards its conclusion.

Grand finale to an epic saga of human survivors pitted against vampiric mutant hordes. Cronin is expert at creating well-developed, believable characters that makes the saga more than just another zombie tale. In this third and last installment Cronin includes the tragic background story of the man who came to be patient Zero and last of the original mutants who control a personal army of the virals. The story timeline jumps from the time of the original outbreak and collapse of modern civilization to a century later and finally to a thousand years later. It is a tale of fear, tragedy, love, hope and triumph where a core group led by the mysterious ageless woman Amy must confront and defeat patient Zero or risk the end of the human race. A must read for fans of the science fiction/horror genre.

Can overwhelming dark power be imparted onto the trapped, restless spirit of one unexpectedly killed after committing acts of passionate murder? Such is the case in this slow unwinding of a ghostly tale set in an idyllic location. Hidden secrets surround the deaths of Englishman David Warwick's twin brother Colin and his wife Helen at their beautiful cottage and gardens within the English countryside. Receiving a dark premonition, David has travelled from his home in New York to see his brother, only to find that Colin and his wife Helen have both recently died under tragic circumstances near their beautiful cottage home. As David picks away at the suspicious unknowns surrounding the deaths and learns more about the tragic history surrounding the cottage he now has inherited, he will be slowly trapped like a fly in a spiders web by a ghostly evil. But will he have enough strength to protect his loving fiancé Shelagh from the evil when she travels from America to be with him? The tension builds and builds toward a final horror-filled, unforgettable conclusion.

I couldn't finish this series that includes a seven-book boxed set digital version. I was hoping for a highly action-oriented book series about an alien invasion of Earth. And, while there is action in the series, it is so strung out that I lost interest. The overall story reads more like a soap opera centering around mainly one wealthy family's experiences connected to the alien invasion. The reader is made to wade through the constant mental chattering and self-questioning going on in each of the characters heads. The insufferable teenage daughter is pregnant, but slides in and out of bed with the baby's unlikable teenage father, who came along for the ride, and one of a group of men who later have inserted themselves into the family's lives. The rich father is divorced from his first comedian entertainer wife and remarried to a much younger trophy wife. However, he still sleeps with his very unfunny first wife when he visits her and thinks she was his original sole-mate. The father's worthless younger teenage son is constantly lusting after his young stepmother. Of course the young trophy wife also gets it on with one of the above mentioned group of men after her husband is taken by the aliens. Oh, and as a side thought the invading aliens are doing violent and mysterious things. If all the nonsense could have been taken out of the series, the entire story, whatever it eventually turns out to be, could probably be fit into two volumes at most.

Science Fiction/Horror writers can never go wrong writing about time travel, faster-than-the speed-of-light space travel, worm-holes, multi-verses or teleportation, as long as they are able to give a bit of a unique twist or a fresh take on one or more of these subjects. Peter Clines has managed to do just that in this novel which also references subject matter from his other exciting novel “14.” Mike Erikson is a true genius with an eidetic memory that continues to catalog everything he has ever experienced with his five senses his entire life. A friend from DARPA has been trying to get him on special projects without luck for many years, but Mike prefers to live a simpler life as a high school English teacher. Finally his friend is able to persuade Mike to act as a simple observer on the Albuquerque Door project to solve a mystery and find out if it is worth continuing to fund the secretive project. The project's technology appears to be successful in opening a fold or doorway in space and the group behind the project have successfully traversed through the doorway rings and back again several times between the two building sites containing the doorway ring sets. But something feels wrong about the project and the project group keep delaying releasing the technology to DARPA on the grounds that more testing is needed. The project staff see Mike as a spy and the enemy and so he has his work cut out for him acting as an impartial observer and cataloging in his memory everything he observes as testing of the project continues. Things begin to go south when one of the staff is killed in a horrific way during another routine test of the doorway. Mike begins to unravel what the misunderstood nature of the doorway is and the secrets the staff has been keeping from everyone about the technology. It isn't long before the project group starts losing control of the technology and as the body count rises Lovecraftian horror is unleashed and Mike and the remaining staff must race against time to divert a disaster that could literally end life on Earth.

As the title indicates this second book in the Old Man's War series focuses on the Special Forces of the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF) of the Colonial Union known as the Ghost Brigades. As we learned in the first book, unlike the regular CDF forces who are taken from Earth's elder population, volunteers that sign up for off-world military service for a second chance at a youthful, enhanced existence, the Ghost Brigades are generated from the DNA of volunteers who died before they could become regular CDF soldiers. With generated personalities and even greater enhancements the Ghost Brigades from day one are created solely to be supreme military fighters and they and their missions are, for the most part, kept separate from the CDF regulars. Both CDF regulars and the Ghost Brigades are sent out to protect human colonists on worlds threatened by various alien races and most of their ranks never live to finish their term of service. And, even if they make it to the end of their period of service, they may never return to Earth.

We met one of those Special Forces soldiers in the first book, Jane Sagan, who was generated from the DNA of the dead wife of the main character in that book, John Perry, a CDF regular. When it is discovered that a traitorous CU scientist has escaped, leaving a dead clone of himself as a deception and working with three alien races to defeat the CU forces, which could possibly lead to the extinction of humanity, Jane Sagan and her Special Forces team is brought in to lead a dangerous mission to recapture the scientist and defeat the alien plot.

A kink in the mission is that Jane must use and watch a new member of her team, Jared Dirac, who was created from the DNA of the dead clone of the traitorous scientist Charles Boutin and whose consciousness was experimentally downloaded into the new soldier. Wanting to know what had made Charles Boutin turn traitor and where he fled to, the experiment to try and recreate Charles Boutin so he could be interrogated didn't appear to work and Jared Dirac develops his own personality and becomes a good Special Forces soldier. However, as time goes on memories from Charles Boutin begin to creep into Jared's consciousness. Through their integrated Brain-pals Jane must keep watch on Jared to make sure he remains loyal to the mission and eliminate him if he starts to show the same traitorous tendencies as Charles Boutin.

As in the first book the action is non-stop and there are new surprising reveals about the Colonial Union and its never ending conflicts with alien races, raising many questions. These reveals will most certainly be further delved into in the next book in the series.

These are truly strange stories but I can't really say I enjoyed reading this anthology of Robert Aickman's works. As was mentioned in the Afterword by Jean Richardson, Aikman's style of writing has the feel of having been written by someone from the late 19th or early 20th century, even though it is made clear that one of the stories is set after WWII, “The Clock Watcher.” This is not always bad, and very Lovecraftian, except when the writer, through the story's characters, embellishes or drones on upon minor occurrences or details that don't appear to add any substance to the meat of the story (perhaps I'm just missing some symbolic significance). The thing I'm finding reading much of strange fiction is that though the stories are somewhat unsettling, they never seem to go anywhere. It's often frustrating. The one exception in this anthology would be “Pages From a Young Girl's Journal”; a vampire story told from the naïve written perspective of the vampire's young, and I might say parentally neglected, victim. Its significance is that, with tweaking, the story could be written as an account from the diary of a pedophile victim from today. However, in the majority of cases the protagonists seem to be overly self absorbed and strange in their own right. One wonders if they are in need of psychiatric help and if what befalls them or what they experience is just a manifestation of their own psychosis. Okay, that's strange, but strange and weird happenings can really grip a reader when the main protagonist is relatable to the reader. I just didn't find that here and so the weirdness in a way felt false.

This book introduces the character Cormac, a new recruit in Polity Earth Central Security forces (the ECS). Through flashbacks the reader is introduced to Cormac and his mother and brother when he was a child. He has known little of his father, a soldier on the frontlines of the war between the Polity and the crab-like alien Prador civilization. Some strange events that happened to him as a child involving a shadowy scorpion-shaped combat droid now seem to gain significance as Cormac's first assignment as a raw recruit soon entangles him in a terrorist plot by Separatists embedded within his own unit. After narrowly escaping with his life after being captured by Separatists, Cormac is recruited into a Sparkind unit made up of both enhanced human and near-human AI driven machine agents. Their goal is to hunt down the leader of the Separatist unit who escaped with nuclear-like explosives that can be used as terrorist weaponry against AI Polity governance. Cormac will see his first combat against the crafty Separatist who always seems one step ahead of his unit. At the same time he will move closer to finding out about the fate of his father.

This fourth and last book in “Cities in Flight” was my least favorite. The huge amount of scientific jargon was way over my head and the character interaction felt maudlin and jerky to me. The “end of the universe” theme was just over-the-top and felt abruptly added and not believable in the context of the other three books, even though it is Sci-Fi.

This is a period piece set in a small rural town of the 1930s. While on the surface it may appear as a “bad seed” story about two pre-pubescent teen boys, much like several of Stephen King's novels, it weaves horror with nostalgic memories of what it was like to be young in a final summer before the reality of adulthood intervenes. Horrible things are done, but the reader is left with the impression that something more, perhaps supernatural, has also taken place. It's these sorts of lingering questions that make such stories so memorable.

Area X is expanding, taking with it the Southern Reach border facility and its occupants. And, like an infection, the locations where the copies of the surveyor and the anthropologist appeared are also becoming part of Area X. The copy of the biologist, Ghost Bird, and Control have passed into Area X though an entry point created by Ghost Bird. In flashbacks the story of perhaps how the phenomena came into being is slowly revealed and how the lives of the psychologist, the lighthouse keeper, Control's secret-agent mother, Control's maternal secret-agent grandfather, the lone survivor of the first expedition, and two enigmatic people from a group called the Science and Séance Brigade are intertwined in that story. We also follow Ghost Bird and Control within Area X as they travel toward the island and through their characters learn more secrets, find more unanswerable questions and experience more horror.

VanderMeer, in his writing, is able to bring about a feeling of true alien otherness in which the characters in the story can never hope to understand or deal with Area X in any humanly rational way. We receive hints that it is a piece of a larger whole escaping destruction and pulled into Earth existence intentionally through a secret scientific/alchemical experiment gone wrong. Does it come from the stars or does it exist in another time, place and/or dimension? Is it an area controlled by an alien entity (the tunnel/tower creeper)? Is the entire biome the entity? Is it an actual intelligence or is it made up of more than one intelligence? Is it trying to communicate, invade or is it simply indifferent in its existence? What it does do is change/absorb everyone and everything that it comes in contact with into itself through destruction and/or unfathomable mutation and mimicry.

The author has quite an imagination but I kept thinking that his writing style reminded me of reading a comic book without the art. The romantic interaction between several of the characters was very soap opera-ish. The fourth book could have been left out of the series since trying to tie it into the first three books was a muddled mess.

In this weird horror anthology Mark Samuels takes the reader into strange and unsettling places within his prolific imagination. Unlike a lot of weird fiction I actually found these stories to be quite creepy in a “Twilight Zone” kind of way. The one that really left a lasting impression was Vrolyck. To me it included facets of Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow horror mythology combined with H. P. Lovecraft's darkly dangerous universe and mixed together with a monstrous Science Fiction tale. It impressed me so much that I had to go back and read it again.

This book finishes the tale of the “idyllic” town of Wayward Pines located in a mountainous Idaho valley. As the story progressed from the first book reveal, it reminded me in some ways of H. G. Wells' Time Machine. In this case the few hundred residents of Wayward Pines are a bit like the Eloi and the world outside the valley that of the Moorlocks. But here the people of Wayward Pines are kept in the dark by the psychopathic leader that put them into their situation and rules over them like a demented god. When Ethan Burke, now acting as town sheriff, takes a big gamble and decides to reveal to the town's population the truth about Wayward Pines, it sets in motion a series of events that will lead to the town's destruction and the deaths of most of its inhabitants. That leaves the final question to be answered “Is there any way out for the remaining inhabitants of Wayward Pines?” Even though this story included some sappy love story drama that really didn't add much to the tale, the basic imaginative core of the story and the many action sequences had me racing through pages ‘til the end.

Thirty-eight-year-old agent John Rodriguez, better known as “Control,” on a downward slide in his career, has been sent into the thirty-year-old Southern Reach facility as the new director and a “fixer” to try and get answers to Area X. Three of the women from the 12th expedition into Area X have suddenly appeared in various locations; the biologist, the anthropologist and the surveyor. The reader knows that from the original book the psychologist, the anthropologist and the surveyor were all killed in Area X and the biologist, who was going through transformation, decided to stay in Area X and travel further into its interior.

The Southern Reach has become a backwater secret facility, since in its thirty years of sending teams into Area X (many more than 12) nothing tangible has ever been learned. The staff has been reduced and the equipment in the creepy facility is aging or abandoned. The frustration, fear and losses of thirty years of fruitless efforts to understand Area X have taken their toll on the remaining staff. We learn that the missing psychologist from the last 12th expedition was the prior director of Southern Reach and, for unknown personal reasons, decided to join the 12th expedition into Area X.

As Control tries to get a better understanding of Southern Reach, the staff and Area X he always appears psychologically outmatched and stymied by the females that surround him, whether it be the uncooperative facility's assistant director; his main interest for information about Area X, the uncooperative biologist; or his domineering, but almost never present, secretive, high-ranking agent mother. And, he has to constantly check in with, and be harangued by, an enigmatic phone contact at Central (the CIA?) only known as the “Voice.”

The reader witnesses the events that take place at Southern Reach through the eyes, experiences and thoughts of Control as he attempts to figure out just what happened and is happening at the Southern Reach facility and begins to wonder if he, like the members of Area X expeditions, is just another pawn for Central in something larger.

Like the first volume of Lovecraftian short horror stories this second entry in the “Black Wings of Cthulhu” was a mixture, some stories closer to Lovecraft's style and others not so much. All stories covered a take on a dive into madness for the main protagonists. There was one story IMHO, ‘The Wilcox Remainder' by Brian Evenson, that I would have added something extra to the ending to make it even more creepy. The story that stayed with me the most was ‘The Skinless Face' by Donald Tyson. Though set in modern times, this short story contained true elements from Lovecraft's nightmare world of “The Great Old Ones.” ‘The Other Man' by Nicholas Royle is one of those really strange stories that leaves it up to the reader's imagination to decide just how to interpret it. It would make for a great conversation piece among other readers. So now it's on to volume three of the “Black Wings of Cthulhu” series of anthologies.

This was an amazing and imaginative story set in a far-flung future. In this future world of the Polity, AI has come to govern human civilization that has spread out across the galaxy using both physical spaceships and matter transmitter gates called runcibles. It is not an overtly despotic rule, since humans can now live for centuries in relative comfort exploring personal interests within certain AI guidelines. It is also a future of very advanced nanotechnology in which each person can change and augment their physical forms in specialized ways. However, some balk at AI control and augmentation and long to be free to explore what it means to be a truly free human being. Some turn to violence against AI control that the AI easily quashes, while others look to less violent means to become more independent with AI's permission. As an aside, over the centuries of exploration ancient ruins containing highly advanced technology left by an extinct advanced race called the Jain has been found on worlds throughout the galaxy. However, it appears that the Jain purposely left this technology knowing that its use by any future races would only lead to their ultimate destruction.

Through continuous flashbacks between past, near past and the present the story unfolds through the eyes and memories of the main character Ursula Ossect Treloon, who after surviving a period of ennui that happens to the long-lived, with AI's permission has used her lifetime's amassed fortune to gather 800 others like herself to set up a colony on Threpsis, a remote and very hostile world away from most Polity AI control. She and the members of her colony hope to find a path to a more human existence. Under a blazing sun, all lifeforms on the desert-like planet are hostile and deadly, forcing the colonists to turn to the one non-colonist and Polity provided enigmatic scientist Oren Salazar to provide upgraded nanosuites to enhance their makeup and the makeup of their crops in order to adapt and survive. But there is one nightmarish life form, an apex predator or cacoraptor, that begins to kill and consume the colonists; a life form that is able to quickly adapt to outmaneuver any defenses the colonists can throw up, and whose sole focus seems to be the eradication of the colonists. After the raptors destroy the colonies means of escape off the planet, it seems inevitable that Ursula and her dwindling number of colonists will have to request the Polity retrieve them from Threpsis. However, before the colony can be rescued, another hostile galactic race, the Prador, is met by the Polity and a galactic war breaks out in which the Polity is soon at a disadvantage against the Prador's invincible ship armor. With hope of rescue gone, the remaining colonists face another threat when a damaged Prador shuttle lands near the colony and Ursula and the remaining colonists must give up more and more of their humanity and turn to evermore drastic nano augmentation to survive the onslaught of the raptors and hopefully attack and defeat the Prador in order to take their ship and leave the planet. And, Ursula continues to question why AI scans of Threpsis supposedly never revealed the existence of the raptors or of Jain technological ruins on the planet.

There is non-stop action throughout the book, which crosses the boundaries between Science Fiction and Horror, much like the Alien franchise. It is well worth a read and I'm looking forward to other books by the author set in the Polity universe.

Though far-fetched and a bit dated, the continuing adventures of the spacefaring city of New York with its never-aging, indomitable Mayor Amalfi, is a true action-packed space opera.

A very strange story that is difficult to describe. We are presented with four unnamed women entering a truly alien region located near an ocean somewhere on Earth called Area X. A mysterious agency known as Southern Reach has been sending groups of volunteers to probe the slowly growing Area X for an unknown period of time and supposedly with little success; all members of previous expeditions either never returning or returning with psychological problems and little useful information. The story is told from the point of the woman known as the biologist with the other three members of the group being a surveyor, an anthropologist and a psychologist. This is supposedly the 12th expedition into Area X with the biologist's husband having been part of the 11th. Members of the 11th expedition had somehow left Area X unbeknownst to Southern Reach and mysteriously turned up back with their family members; however, they once again were changed and, after Southern Reach reacquired them, they soon became ill and died. There is a different kind of biology going on in Area X that seems to emanate from some unknown life form located in an underground, downward winding tunnel that the biologist perceives and refers to as a tower. Another point of reference important to the narrative is an old lighthouse within Area X. Those who enter the region soon come under the influence of Area X and begin to change in various ways, so it is hard to say from the narrative what is truly physical reality and what may be affecting the narrator mentally. I can't help thinking of the tunnel with its mysterious luminescent, living writing etched on the walls as an entry point to Lovecraft's realm of “The Old Ones.”

I found the biologist character to be a very cold person, possibly stemming from childhood trauma, and the other three women, who play more minor roles, not much better. She constantly realizes that her study of biology is what drives her, but in a self-interested way. She has little empathy or care for others, even her husband, and often berates herself knowing she is like this. The story covers the biologist's experiences and transformation in Area X, the fates of the other three members of the expedition and the discovery of secrets kept from the group. One note: For readers, like myself, who have first seen the film adaptation of this story, Hollywood, as usual, has taken great latitude in its presentation of the material.