It's getting late.

I don’t have too sharp a sense of time any more, but I know it must be after eleven, and maybe even getting on for midnight. I’m reluctant to look at my watch, though—because that will only remind me of how little time I have left.

In any case, it’s getting late.

And it’s quiet. Apart from the ice-machine humming outside my door and the occasional car passing by on the highway, I can’t actually hear a thing—no traffic, or sirens, or music, or local people talking, or animals making weird nightcalls to each other, if that’s what animals do. Nothing. No sounds at all. It’s eerie, and I don’t really like it. So maybe I shouldn’t have come all the way up here. Maybe I should have just stayed in the city, and let the time-lapse flicker of the lights short-circuit my now preternatural attention span, let the relentless bustle and noise wear me down and burn up all this energy I’ve got pumping through my system. But if I hadn’t come up here to Vermont, to this motel—to the Northview Motor Lodge—where would I have stayed? I couldn’t very well have inflicted my little mushroom-cloud of woes on any of my friends, so I guess I had no option but to do what I did—get in a car and leave the city, drive hundreds of miles up here to this quiet, empty part of the country . . .

When a book gets the Hollywood treatment, it usually means the addition of three things: A happy ending, a love interest, and a car chase. This pretty much sums up the main differences between Alan Glynn's novel and its movie adaptation. Most of Eddie Spinola's story is essentially the same: He bumps into his ex-brother-in-law, gets into possession of brain-function-enhancing drugs, borrows some money from a Russian loan-shark to get into stock market day-trading, excels at that and gets hired by an investment banker to broker a massive merger for a huge bonus. But he does not have a girl friend that he needs to win back, he is not being chased by a mysterious man trying to steal his stash, and without giving away too much, it should be obvious from the bookending opening paragraphs that while Eddie Spinola pictures himself in an ending very much like the one Eddie Morra gets to enjoy in the movie, things do not quite pan out that way.