CAME THE DARK....They lay on their sides, facing each other. In the half-light of the cave he could see the sheen of her eyes, the slow curve of her waist."So we wait," she said."And we'll have to be very careful," he answered. "He likes the night. He even likes us right now, waiting for us to come out, to give him the pleasure of killing us. Killing ... that's really his only pleasure."She rolled onto her back. Her voice was soft. "We're going to make it," she said. "We've got the money, and we'll get the car and then there's Buenos Aires, Paris and...."They were quiet for a while until suddenly he heard her breath begin to quicken. She turned toward him and he pulled her close. There was time....
About the Author: John Dann MacDonald (July 24, 1916 - December 28, 1986) was an American writer of novels and short stories, known for his thrillers. MacDonald was a prolific author of crime and suspense novels, many of them set in his adopted home of Florida. His best-known works include the popular and critically acclaimed Travis McGee series, and his novel The Executioners, which was filmed twice as Cape Fear. In 1972, MacDonald was named a grandmaster of the Mystery Writers of America, and he won a 1980 U.S. National Book Award in the one-year category Mystery. Stephen King praised MacDonald as "the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller." Kingsley Amis said, MacDonald "is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?" As the boom in paperback novels expanded, MacDonald successfully made the jump to longer fiction with his first novel, The Brass Cupcake, published in 1950, by Fawcett Publications' Gold Medal Books. His science fiction included the stories "Cosmetics" in Astounding (1948) and "Common Denominator" in Galaxy Science Fiction (1951), and the three novels Wine of the Dreamers (1951), Ballroom of the Skies (1952), and The Girl, the Gold Watch, & Everything (1962), which were collected as an omnibus in Time and Tomorrow (1980). Between 1953 and 1964, MacDonald specialized in crime thrillers, many of which are now considered masterpieces of the hardboiled genre. Most of these novels were published as paperback originals, although some were later republished in hardbound editions. Many, such as Dead Low Tide (1953) and Murder in the Wind (1956), were set in his adopted home of Florida, and were effective in suggesting a sinister aura lurking beneath the glittery surface of that state. Novels such as The Executioners (1957) (which was twice filmed as Cape Fear, first in 1962 and again in 1991) and One Monday We Killed Them All (1962) penetrated the minds of psychopathic killers. As MacDonald honed his craft, he developed his narrative "voice," one of the most distinctive in the suspense fiction field. He is credited with writing about the effect of the building boom on the environment, and his novel A Flash of Green (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962) is a good example of this. Many later Florida crime, detective and mystery writers, such as Paul Levine, Randy Wayne White, James Hall and Jonathon King, have followed suit.