It's happening on Grant Island, now called Hell Island, and it's here that six hundred plus men have died. They were mostly Marines, and in an effort to find out this has happened, the United States military has sent in four elite teams of military warriors of ten men each. They are one team of the 82nd Airborne division, one Seal team, one Delta Team, and one team of Force Reconnaissance Marines. The Marines are lead by the legendary 'super-soldier' Captain Shane M. Schofield, whose code name is "Scarecrow" because of his badly scarred face. This is his first assignment after a long, forced rest, and his job, along with the other three teams, is to infiltrate, separately, as the other three teams are also supposed to do, the USS Nimitz CUN-68, which transported the slaughtered six-hundred soldiers there during a recent tropical storm. "Hell Island" by Matthew Reilly spills the beans on what the mystery of Hell Island is on the very first page with an illustration, the first of twenty illustrations and maps, by Tyler Jacobson. The mysterious super-soldiers that all four teams will be pitted against on Hell Island are a form of super scientifically enhanced gorilla. A form of gorilla that knows no fear, feels no pain, and is super smart with the ability to formulate complex attack strategies. I really wanted to like this novella, I really did, but I ended up being greatly disappointed in it. The first problem is the characters. They are all caricatures, and cartoonish clichés. Captain Shane M. Schofield for instance is clearly a Bruce Willis "John McClane" rip-off; tough, bad-ass, invulnerable, and ever resourceful. His crew is no different, there are the red shirts that are quickly and bloodily disposed of, and there is his core team, with cute code-names and who are right out central casting. There is the loyal newbie, the whiney vet, and bull-dykish pseudo-gorillaish female warrior who is clearly modeled after Pvt. Vasquez from the movie Aliens. And here we go with another unbelievable plot twist. I find it hard to believe that our current military is going to allow females, no matter how much a genetic throwback that they are, to serve on an all male super-squad. And then there's the plot. Well, there just isn't one. This is basically a chase and kill novella. The characters are never developed so I simply didn't care when they died. The Marines parachute down on Hell Island and when they arrive on the Nimitz, they almost immediately know that they are being hunted. Then the cat-and-mouse game begins, as one overwhelming battle after another is staged with one impossible, and contrived, deus ex machine style escape after another is staged to get the soldiers out of their contrived fixes. We also get plot-twists at the end to explain things that are just cliché, ridiculous, cynical, and jaw-dropping stoopid. I mean, six hundred Marines were just slaughter because . . . because . . . WHAT?!? And nobody in this overly-mediaed age is going to notice these six hundred plus deaths and/or disappearances? Really? C'mon, just how stupid does the author think we are? This is the fourth in the Scarecrow series, and it didn't encourage me to go out and read any of the other novels, although I might have cared more if I had read them first. It would have been nice if it had been mentioned that this was part of an ongoing series. Now, while this novella might make a good core basis for a made-for-DVD movie, or comic book mini-series, even these have some basic standards. There has to be more character, plot, and background development to lift this book out of amateur status. At best, this is a basic outline for a better piece of work, and reads like the last quarter of a much better novel. In fact, for a better take on this theme, try watching the 1999 Ron Perlman movie "Primal Force" sometime. I did like the twenty or so illustrations by Tyler Jacobson, they give the hint that this would probably make a pretty good video game, but this ain't a video game, this is prose, and it just doesn't work as it is. The quote that is the title to this review is an example of the clichéd and undemanding prose that plagues this work.