One big difference between long, long ago and now is that the Neanderthals of long, long ago couldn’t write. Now they can. And do.

Then, they grunted. Now they write short declarative sentences. All the time. When they get about 20,000 of them, they stop and call it a "novel."

Used to be, only the highly educated wrote. Now, everybody writes, including the Neanderthals.

They fancy a thoroughly Hobbesian world ("red in tooth and claw") where "good-hearted" might makes right and always wins. Me Tarzan, you Jane.

Though it’s impolite and impolitic to point out, Neanderthal writers are zealots. Their blindered view of things comes from a fierce (and, they think, hard-won) belief that they know right from wrong. In every situation. Which gives their stories a powerful seductive edge, like that of carefully wrought propaganda. My way or the highway. (Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, et al.have a lot to answer for.

Their protagonists—always male, of course—strut, preen, and flex with a kind of strained modesty, but when push comes to shiv (as it inevitably must in the Neanderthal world), they reveal insuperable skills at fisticuffs, rassling, tae kwan do or whatever violence the occasion requires.

When the tough get going, the going gets tough.

Among self-proclaimed, many redeeming qualities, the old-hat good guys are sensitive to, and concerned with, the welfare of, children and women. The best of them go out of their way to not only save children and women from the jungle scavengers lurking everywhere in the underbrush but to impart to them whatever survival skills children and women are capable of learning with their limited awareness of how dangerous the world is.

The tough guy as nurterer. Think Terminator as governor of California.

Though their prose, like their world, is flat and two-dimensional (remember those simple declarative sentences), sometimes our throwback scriveners fluff up their sentences with a simple (nothing sissified, mind you) adverb or adjective. Showing off, they may even insert an occasional stylistic affectation, such as the ever-popular gerundial sentence fragment—a truly grating device to be found on most pages of Elmore Leonard.

Now and then they’ll smear the narrative out laterally (John Grisham, Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy) and add flounces of timely brand-name references, hip jargon, cutting edge gadgetry, scary technology.

Done properly, Neanderthal fiction is a money pot. Every once and a while you find a non-Neanderthal writer who is capable of much more, learning the simplistic craft, twisting the aperture way down to an astonishing depth of field, and making a mint off trail-boss talk a hundred years too late. Done to a crisp it’ll even get you a National Book Award, onto the best-seller lists, and movie options galore.

Such work can find a audience only in a world inhabited by large numbers of the similarly minded, who, like their favorite authors, go to the end of their days comfortable in the fragile, violent, cowardly Johnwaynism that informed their troubled and endlessly troubling lives.

Do they, do you think, at or near the moment of death realize the shallow falsity of their posing, the cracked clay foundation on which they had erected their stately mansions?