And I suddenly realized that I had gone well beyond the point of choice. Even if I changed my mind and decided to fall in step with everybody else, it was now too late. Only in the animated cartoons could a small creature fall off a mountain, look down, register surprise, and climb back up through the empty air to safety.

As great a fan as I am of John D. MacDonald’s work, there are some of his books I’m not going to read again. Some of them are his explicitly environmental stories – though much of what he says is true, especially in deploring the over-development of Florida. But in that regard I’m like the people who say, “My parents dragged me to church every Sunday when I was a kid, and I’m never going back.”

The other MacDonald books I avoid are ones that just left too intense an impression. Dark stories with dark accounts of the suffering of the innocent. MacDonald is never a slasher writer, but his very skill makes the sorrow and the pity harder to bear.

The End of the Night is a book I hadn’t read before now, and I won’t be reading again – for that reason alone. But it’s still an excellent story of its kind. Part thriller, part horror tale. Dark, but excellently done.

The End of the Night opens in a way that informs you from the start exactly what you’re in for. We read a description of the executions, by electrocution, of four young people – a quirky, maladjusted mastermind, a big, thuggish Hispanic man, a slatternly girl, and a nice-looking young man from a “good family.” We learn that they were captured in the midst of a multi-state murder spree during which they killed several men and kidnapped and murdered a lovely, wealthy young woman a few days before her wedding.

The story is told in the words of several story participants, but mainly through the self-conscious memoir of the defense attorney and the final written confession of the “nice” young man. Chapter by chapter the story unfolds, evoking a rising sense of horror in the reader.

I half expected this book to be a plain condemnation of the death penalty, but it’s more complex than that. Although we know the ending, the road to that ending includes more than one surprise. What look, to the modern reader, like echoes of the Manson Family killings are actually unwitting prophecy, as the book was published in 1960.

Recommended, with cautions for intense, mature situations.