Semi-Tough pokes fun in rambling fashion, but it is vulgar in intelligent ways and almost always amusing in its perceptions of befuddled people who are perfectly healthy but often convinced they're not.

There's no doubt about it. Arcadia is Tom Stoppard's richest, most ravishing comedy to date, a play of wit, intellect, language, brio and, new for him, emotion. It's like a dream of levitation: you're instantaneously aloft, soaring, banking, doing loop-the-loops and then, when you think you're about to plummet to earth, swooping to a gentle touchdown of not easily described sweetness and sorrow.

Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives.

Semi-Tough pokes fun in rambling fashion, but it is vulgar in intelligent ways and almost always amusing in its perceptions of befuddled people who are perfectly healthy but often convinced they're not.

Horror need not always be a long-fanged gentleman in evening clothes or a dismembered corpse or a doctor who keeps a brain in his gold fish bowl. It may be a warm sunny day, the innocence of girlhood and hints of unexplored sexuality that combine to produce a euphoria so intense it becomes transporting, a state beyond life or death. Such horror is unspeakable not because it is gruesome but because it remains outside the realm of things that can be easily defined or explained in conventional ways.

Nothing in Death Hunt makes a great deal of sense, though the scenery is rugged and the snowscapes beautiful.

It is guaranteed to put all teeth on edge, including George Washington's, wherever they might be.