TRIAL AT MONOMOY
In Cape Cod the temperature was 18 below zero. A relentless blizzard was creating snowy white mountains of up to twenty feet in height. This was the kind of storm that stripped a man of all social and moral conventions... stripped him down to the basic, selfish instinct of survival. Most of the Monomoy folk gathered in the Longships Hotel, hoping for refuge. Power, fuel, water and communications were giving out. The tide was coming so fast it threatened to wash the town into the bay. And the Longships itself was smack in the path of the raging ocean. Unless a miracle occurred the hotel and all its occupants would be swept away by waves fourteen feet high, coming through it like express trains. Inside the Longships a fearful, elemental drama was being played out. And more than one appalled spectator felt that, after the events of the past two days, the town might well be better off buried, like a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah.