** spoiler alert ** 
 I fell in love with the HBO series and wante to read the books, but was afraid of spoilers. The first book, despite some differences, followed the general flow of the first season, but everyone told me in the second book, they started to dramtically veer. 
 And they did. 
 And the book was 100 times better than the show (which I LOVED) 
 The characters have more depth. I still love Eric more than Bill but there's some more depth to the secondary characters that make them less annoying. I loved learing at the end of this book the Andy Bellfluer is the Bill's great great great grandson brings him a wonderful bit of humanity that he needed in my world.