A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 1987 Presidio Press Harold Coyle's Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III (Presidio Press, 1987) was published a year after Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising's triumphant debut in hardcover.  Although it is thematically similar (Soviet forces invade West Germany after a series of crises escalate into an all-out conventional war), Coyle's approach is very different from Clancy's. Instead of creating his own possible scenario for a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact confrontation, he asked for, and received, permission from British author (and retired General) Sir John Hackett to set Team Yankee within the scenario created in Hackett's two "speculative fiction" books The Third World War: August 1985 and The Third World War: The Untold Story. Team Yankee takes place within a two-week period in an August in the late 1980s. Since late July, a series of crises precipitated by the Iran-Iraq war has morphed into a clash between U.S. and Soviet naval forces in the

Dust jacket of the original 1986 hardcover edition. Art by Bob Giusti. Lettering by Amy Hill. (C) 1986 Viking Press/Penguin Random House I'm glad I don't live in Maine. Oh, I'm not talking about the real New England state that was once part of Massachusetts and is famous for its lobsters and still very rural ambiance. I've never even been there, although I wouldn't rule out a tourist excursion at some point in the future, though if I do go, it would probably be in the summer, since winters up North are too chilly and snowbound for this Miami native's taste. No, the Maine I'm talking about is the Maine that exists in the imagination of Stephen King. Quite a few of his novels are set there, most of them in the fictional towns of Castle Rock, Tarker's Mills, Jerusalem's Lot, Little Tall Island....and Derry. Here, in towns that have existed since before the American Revolution, the inhabitants of these communities have coexisted with vampires