William Golding's first novel, The Lord Of The Flies, is the most unremittingly negative book I have ever read. Yes, it's genius. Yes, I've read it many times, starting when I was far too young to grasp much of it. The story is well known, a group of boys from a private school board a plane to escape atomic war and it crashes on a jungle island, usually assumed to be in the Pacific. As I recall, the plane leaves from England so the island would be in the Caribbean. Since the story is speculative but not science fiction the only plane capable at the time of making a flight from England to a tropical island was the Globemaster, with a range of about 4000 miles. I'll get back to you guys about that. Written in reaction to the 1857 novel The Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne, Golding felt that the boys, any group of boys, would go feral in such circumstances. The book has become symbolic of mankind at large, and is often cited as a griml...