The electric dream

There’s no doubt who got me off originally and that was A.E. van Vogt…The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe that is not to be feared.

—Philip K. Dick, in an interview with Vertex

I recently finished reading I Am Alive and You Are Dead, the French author Emmanuel Carrère’s novelistic biography of Philip K. Dick. In an article last year about Carrère’s work, James Wood of The New Yorker called it “fantastically engaging,” noting: “There are no references and very few named sources, yet the material appears to rely on the established record, and is clearly built from the same archival labor that a conventional biographer would perform.” It’s very readable, and it’s one of the few such biographies—along with James Tiptree, Jr. by Julie Phillips and a certain upcoming book—aimed at intelligent audience outside the fan community. Dick’s life also feels relevant now in ways that we might not have anticipated two decades ago, when the book was first published in France. He’s never been as central to me as he has for many other readers, mostly because of the accidents of my reading life, and I’ve only read a handful of his novels and stories. I’m frankly more drawn to his acquaintance and occasional correspondent Robert Anton Wilson, who ventured into some of the same dark places and returned with his sanity more or less intact. (One notable difference between the two is that Wilson was a more prolific experimenter with psychedelic drugs, which Dick, apart from one experience with LSD, appears to have avoided.) But no other writer, with one notable exception that I’ll mention below, has done a better job of forcing us to confront the possibility that our understanding of the world might be fatally flawed. And it’s quite possible that he serves as a better guide to the future than any of the more rational writers who populated the pages of Astounding.

What deserves to be remembered about Dick, though, is that he loved the science fiction of the golden age, and he’s part of an unbroken chain of influence that goes back to the earliest days of the pulps. In I Am Alive and You Are Dead, Carrère writes of Dick as a young boy: “He collected illustrated magazines with titles like Astounding and Amazing and Unknown, and these periodicals, in the guise of serious scientific discussion, introduced him to lost continents, haunted pyramids, ships that vanished mysteriously in the Sargasso Sea.” (Carrère, weirdly, puts a superfluous exclamation point at the end of the titles of all these magazines, which I’ve silently removed in these quotations.) Dick continued to collect pulps throughout his life, keeping the most valuable issues in a fireproof safe at his house in San Rafael, California, which was later blown open in a mysterious burglary. Throughout his career, Dick refers casually to classic stories with an easy familiarity that suggests a deep knowledge of the genre, as in a line from his Exegesis, in which he mentions “that C.L. Moore novelette in Astounding about the two alternative futures hinging on which of two girls the guy marries in the present.” But the most revealing connection lies in plain sight. In a section on Dick’s early efforts in science fiction, Carrère writes:

Stories about little green men and flying saucers…were what he was paid to write, and the most they offered in terms of literary recognition was comparison to someone like A.E. van Vogt, a writer with whom Phil had once been photographed at a science fiction convention. The photo appeared in a fanzine above the caption “The Old and the New.”

Carrère persistently dismisses van Vogt as a writer of “space opera,” which might be technically true, though hardly the whole story. Yet he was also the most convincing precursor that Dick ever had. The World of Null-A may be stylistically cruder than Dick at his best, but it also appeared in Astounding in 1945, and it remains so hallucinatory, weird, and undefinable that I still have trouble believing that it was read by twelve-year-olds. (As Dick once said of it in an interview: “All the parts of that book do not add up; all the ingredients did not make a coherency. Now some people are put off by that. They think it’s sloppy and wrong, but the thing that fascinated me so much was that this resembled reality more than anybody else’s writing inside or outside science fiction.”) Once you see the almost apostolic line of succession from van Vogt to Alfred Bester to Dick, the latter seems less like an anomaly within the genre than like an inextricable part of its fabric. Although he only sold one short story, “Impostor,” to John W. Campbell, Dick continued to submit to him for years, before concluding that it wasn’t the best use of his time. As Eric Leif Davin recounts in Partners in Wonder: “[Dick] said he’d rather write several first-draft stories for one cent a word than spend time revising a single story for Campbell, despite the higher pay.” And Dick recalled in his collection The Minority Report:

Horace Gold at Galaxy liked my writing whereas John W. Campbell, Jr. at Astounding considered my writing not only worthless but as he put it, “Nuts.” By and large I liked reading Galaxy because it had the broadest range of ideas, venturing into the soft sciences such as sociology and psychology, at a time when Campbell (as he once wrote me!) considered psionics a necessary premise for science fiction. Also, Campbell said, the psionic character in the story had to be in charge of what was going on.

As a result, the two men never worked closely together, although Dick had surprising affinities with the editor who believed wholeheartedly in psionics, precognition, and genetic memory, and whose magazine never ceased to play a central role in his inner life. In his biography, Carrère provides an embellished version of a recurring dream that Dick had at the age of twelve, “in which he found himself in a bookstore trying to locate an issue of Astounding that would complete his collection.” As Dick describes it in his autobiographical novel VALIS:

In the dream he again was a child, searching dusty used-book stores for rare old science fiction magazines, in particular Astoundings. In the dream he had looked through countless tattered issues, stacks upon stacks, for the priceless serial entitled “The Empire Never Ended.” If he could find it and read it he would know everything; that had been the burden of the dream.

Years later, the phrase “the empire never ended” became central to Dick’s late conviction that we were all living, without our knowledge, in the Rome of the Acts of the Apostles. But the detail that sticks with me the most is that the magazines in the dream were “in particular Astoundings.” The fan Peter Graham famously said that the real golden age of science fiction was twelve, and Dick reached that age at the end of 1940, at the peak of Campbell’s editorship. The timing was perfect for Astounding to rewire his brain forever. When Dick first had his recurring dream, he would have just finished reading a “priceless serial” that had appeared in the previous four issues of the magazine, and I’d like to think that he spent the rest of his life searching for its inconceivable conclusion. It was van Vogt’s Slan.

The believer

Note: Spoilers follow for “My Struggle IV,” the eleventh season finale of The X-Files. 

There are times when I think that The X-Files was the most important thing that ever happened to me. I’m not saying that it carries much weight compared to getting married or having a kid, but as far as pop culture is concerned, if you wanted to go back in time and remove just one piece to cause the maximal change in my life, you couldn’t do any better than this. If I had never seen The Red Shoes or read Jorge Luis Borges or even listened to the Pet Shop Boys, I’d be immeasurably poorer for it, but my overall biography would be more or less unchanged. The X-Files, by contrast, was a determining factor in how I spent my time for years. I wrote fanfic throughout high school and college. My first published short story, “Inversus,” was basically a straight casefile with the names changed, and only a timely rejection of my second effort from Analog editor Stanley Schmidt kept me from trying to turn it into a series. Of all the stories that I’ve published since, at least half fall comfortably into that formula. My three novels don’t have any paranormal elements, but they represented a conscious attempt to recover some of the magic of two government agents unraveling a conspiracy, and even Astounding is a project that never would have occurred to me if I hadn’t spent most of my life writing science fiction in one form or another. Which is all to say that if you managed to distract me so that I didn’t watch “Squeeze” on September 24, 1993—or even “Humbug” a year and a half later—most of this goes away, or at least gets transformed into a form so different that I wouldn’t be able to recognize it.

Yet it’s also a little embarrassing for me to admit this, not just because The X-Files wasn’t always a good show, even in its prime, but also because I don’t remember much about it. It had the longest run of any science fiction series in the history of television, with two hundred and eighteen episodes and two feature films. That’s a staggering amount of content, and it means that there’s more to know about Mulder and Scully, in theory, than about the main characters of any comparable franchise. In practice, that isn’t how it worked out. There are maybe two dozen episodes of the series that I plan on watching again, along with about fifty more that I remember fairly well. The rest consist of a single image, a vague impression, a logline, or more often nothing at all. Most of the mytharc, in particular, has disappeared entirely from my memory. And one of the problems with last night’s season finale—which probably marks the end to the entire series—is that it assumes that its viewers care about elements that the show flagged as important, but never really meant anything to the audience. I don’t recall much about William, or Mulder’s family drama, and I barely even remember Agent Reyes. These are clearly all things that should matter to the characters, and there’s no question that that loss of their child was the major event in Mulder and Scully’s lives. But it isn’t real to me, which is why I spent most of the episode asking myself why it had to be about this at all. (In any case, there’s already a perfect finale to the show, and it’s called “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat.”)

But the eleventh season as a whole exceeded my expectations to an extent that I’m grateful that it exists. Apart from “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” the tenth season was uniformly painful to watch—it left me feeling humiliated that I’d invested so much of my life into this series, and nobody, aside from Gillian Anderson and Darin Morgan, seemed to have any idea what they were doing. This past season had one great episode (“Forehead Sweat”) and one that came close (“Rm9sbG93ZXJz”), and apart from the opener and closer, which were disasters, the rest ranged from merely watchable to pretty good. Duchovny looked healthier and more relaxed, there were some nice sentimental moments between the two leads that elevated even routine installments, and there was even an attempt to stir some fresh voices into the mix. The fact that the show seems to be ending now is regrettable, but maybe it’s the best possible outcome. And I can even live with the finale, which offers up a winning bingo card of Chris Carter’s worst impulses. It separates Mulder and Scully for most of its runtime; it scrambles the chronology for no apparent reason; it dwells on pointless action and violence; it drops every plot thread that it raises; it spoils a nice fakeout by repeating it just a few minutes later; and its idea of a happy ending is having Scully announce that she’s pregnant again. (“It’s all she’s good for,” my wife remarked dryly.) But it at least it was bad in all the usual ways, without going out of its way to invent new ones, as much of last season did. And as Scully once said about Robert Patrick Modell, I won’t let it take up another minute of my time.

But The X-Files is a lot like life itself—which is only to say that my relationship to it maps onto everything else that matters. If the golden age of science fiction is twelve, as the fan Peter Graham allegedly said, then the show came along at just the right time to change me forever. If I had been born a few years earlier or later, or if I had been watching a different network, it might have been something else. As it turned out, I got sucked into a show that lasted for the quarter of a century that happened to coincide with most of my teens, twenties, and thirties. If I don’t remember a lot of it, well, I can’t recall much about college or the first two years of being a father, either. I just have bits and pieces, which are enough to make up my memories. Dana Scully is my favorite character on television, but my picture of her is assembled from the handful of episodes that understood what made her special, rather than the countless others that abused or misused her to an extent that we’re only just starting to acknowledge. I view her from only one angle, as I do with most of the people in my life, and I see what I want to believe. Like Darin Morgan, I’ve come to identify more with Mulder as I’ve gotten older, not as an action hero, but as the guy who started his career in a basement and ended it nowhere in particular. But you also have to imagine Mulder, like Sisyphus, as happy. I can’t sum up The X-Files in one sentence, but these days, I see it as a show about how to relate with intelligence and grace to a world that remains unknowable, indifferent, and too complicated to change. Maybe it starts with finding someone you love. The finale wasn’t about this, of course. But it never really had to be.

The lantern battery and the golem

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

—Paul Valéry

Yesterday morning, my wife asked me: “Have you seen the illustration for Michael Chabon’s new essay?” She thrust the latest issue of The New Yorker in my direction, and when I looked down, I saw a drawing by Greg Clarke of a little boy reading what was unmistakably a copy of Astounding Science Fiction. The kid is evidently meant to be Chabon himself, and his article, “The Recipe for Life,” is about nothing less than how his inner life was shaped by his father’s memories of an earlier era. Chabon writes:

He talked about comic books, radio dramas, Astounding magazine, and the stories they’d all told: of rocket-powered heroes, bug-eyed monsters, mad scientists bent on ruling the world. He described to me how he had saved box tops from cold cereals like Post Toasties, and redeemed them by mail for Junior G-Man badges or cardboard Flying Fortresses that carried payloads of black marbles. He told me about playing games like potsy, stickball, handball, and ringolevio, and, for the first time but by no means the last, about an enchanted pastry called a charlotte russe, a rosette of whipped cream on a disk of sponge cake served in a scalloped paper cup, topped with a Maraschino cherry. He described having spent weeks in the cellar of his Flatbush apartment building as a young teen-ager, with some mail-order chemicals, five pounds of kosher salt, and a lantern battery, trying to re-create “the original recipe for life on earth,” as detailed in the pages of Astounding.

The younger Chabon listened to his father intently, and all the while, he was “riding the solitary rails of my imagination into our mutual story, into the future we envisioned and the history we actually accumulated; into the vanished world that he once inhabited.”

Chabon’s father seems to have been born around 1938, or right around the time that John W. Campbell took over Astounding, positioning him to barely catch the tail end of the golden age. He would have been about twelve when the article “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science” appeared in the May 1950 issue, which means that he snuck in right under the wire. (As the fan Peter Graham once said: “The golden age of science fiction is twelve.”) In fact, when you account for a gap in age of about eighteen years, the fragments of his childhood that we glimpse here are intriguingly reminiscent of Isaac Asimov. Both were bright Jewish boys growing up in Brooklyn—otherwise known as the center of the universe—and they shared the same vocabulary of nostalgia. Robert Chabon reminisced about stickball and the charlotte russe; Asimov lamented the disappearance of the egg cream and wrote in his memoirs:

We used to play “punchball,” for instance. This was a variant of baseball, played without a lot and without a bat. All you needed was a street (we called it a “gutter”) and a rubber ball. You hit the ball with your clenched fist and from then on it was pretty much like baseball.

I don’t know if kids these days still play punchball, but it survived for long enough to be fondly remembered by Stephen Jay Gould, who was born in 1941 in Queens. For Gould, punchball was nothing less than “the canonical ‘recess’ game…It was the game we would play unless kids specifically called for another form.”

Like many polymaths who thrived at the intersection between science and the arts, Gould and Asimov were raised in secular Jewish households, and Chabon’s essay unfolds against a similar, largely unstated cultural background. He notes that his father knew “the birth names of all five Marx Brothers,” as well as the rather startling fact that Underdog’s archenemy was named Simon Bar Sinister. Recalling his father’s “expression of calm intensity,” Chabon links it to another Jewish icon: “A few years later, I will watch Leonard Nimoy, as Mr. Spock, look up from his scanner on the bridge of the USS Enterprise, and catch an echo of my father’s face.” As he silently watches Fritz Lang’s science fiction epic Metropolis in his ailing father’s bedroom, he imagines the conversation that might have unfolded between them under happier circumstances: “Lang’s mother was Jewish. His wife was a member of the Nazi Party.” “Hey, that would make a great sitcom.” Chabon doesn’t emphasize these connections, perhaps because he’s explored them endlessly elsewhere. In his earlier essay “Imaginary Homelands,” he writes:

For a long time now I’ve been busy, in my life and in my work, with a pair of ongoing, overarching investigations: into my heritage—rights and privileges, duties and burdens—as a Jew and as a teller of Jewish stories; and into my heritage as a lover of genre fiction…Years spent writing novels and stories about golems and the Jewish roots of American superhero comic books, Sherlock Holmes and the Holocaust, medieval Jewish freebooters, Passover Seders attended by protégés of forgotten Lovecraftian horror writers, years of writing essays, memoirs, and nervous manifestos about genre fiction of Jewishness.

This is one of the richest veins imaginable for cultural exploration, and Chabon has conducted it so expertly for so long that he can trust us to make many of the associations for ourselves. Revealingly, this is actually the second essay that he has written under the title “The Recipe for Life.” The first, published almost two decades ago, was a meditation on the myth of the golem, a prototypical science fiction story with anticipatory shades of Frankenstein. In his earlier piece, Chabon quotes the philosopher Gershom Scholem: “Golem-making is dangerous; like all major creation it endangers the life of the creator—the source of danger, however, is not the golem…but the man himself.” Chabon continues:

When I read these words, I saw at once a connection to my own work. Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk…I have come to see this fear, this sense of my own imperilment by my creations, as not only an inevitable, necessary part of writing fiction but as virtual guarantor, insofar as such a thing is possible, of the power of my work: as a sign that I am on the right track, that I am following the recipe correctly, speaking the proper spells.

The recipe, Chabon implies, can come from either “The Idea of the Golem” or Astounding, and we owe much of his remarkable career to that insight, which he implicitly credits, in turn, to his father: “The past and the future became alloyed in my imagination: magic and science, heroes and villains, brick-and-steel Brooklyn and the chromium world of tomorrow.”

Reading your own future

If you were to ask me why you should bother reading the science fiction of the thirties and forties, I’d say that you probably shouldn’t. At least not until you really felt like it. “The golden age of science fiction is twelve,” the fan Peter Graham famously said, and he was even more right than he knew: most readers get into science fiction in their preteens, and they read it in the way everyone should at that age—which is to say, essentially at random. A tattered paperback cover that catches your eye counts for a lot more than a recommendation from any adult, and you follow your nose from one title to the next, like a bee moving between flowers. For my generation, the gateway drug was likely to be a novel like Ender’s Game, which is still going strong, but the specific books and authors don’t matter very much. What counts is that science fiction scratches an itch that certain young readers never knew they had, and once they’ve experienced that feeling, they’re bound to seek it out again, even if it’s in a haphazard fashion. And it should be haphazard, at least at first. Science fiction has always been characterized by the intense pleasure that it gives to its readers, and by the inexpressible psychic craving that it satisfies, and the writers who do it best for any given individual can’t be predicted in advance. What young readers are really doing, aside from falling in love with the idea of the genre, is refining their instincts about where the loot is buried, which often involves finding characters who look and talk more or less like they do. They take plenty of wrong turns and they read a lot of junk along the way, but it mostly evens out in the end.

Here’s the funny thing: a young reader of twelve today, left to his or her own devices, is recreating exactly the same process that led to the creation of the science fiction community more than eighty years ago. Readers of that generation weren’t particularly picky. They were mostly limited to what appeared in the newsstand pulps every month, much of which was frankly terrible, and there weren’t any anthologies available. When you go back to read some of those forgotten stories now, it’s easy to wonder how the genre survived at all. But if it hung on so tenaciously, even as the magazines themselves struggled or folded, it was because of the urgent, primal need that it filled. When you’re reading to save your life, or to convince yourself that there’s something more to this world than the sticky hell of early adolescence, you’re not going to be overly discriminating in what you consume. This isn’t to say that fans couldn’t criticize the stories once they were done: one of the first things you notice when you go back to read the old letters columns in Astounding is how cheerfully the readers savage the magazines that they claimed to love. Tearing apart stories that don’t meet your standards is a pastime as honorable as fandom itself, and it only works when your confidence isn’t limited by your age or experience. Their opinions were idiosyncratic, unreasonable, prone to falling into violent disputes over tiny differences, and cobbled together from some of the least orderly reading lives imaginable. They were sorting it out for themselves, and the last thing you wanted was to tell them what to read—no more than you’d try to control a preteen who was discovering science fiction for the first time today. The only project that matters is the creation of the reader, and it emerges when it’s left mostly alone.

This doesn’t happen overnight. It might take six months, or twenty years. But once that reader bursts into existence—full of conviction, righteous prejudice, and disdain for the status quo—it becomes easier to see why it’s worth going back to those older writers. Along the way, the average fan will have read scraps of the old tradition here and there, but as soon as you go back to engage with it more systematically, it’s usually for a reason. As Paul Valéry said: “One only reads well that which one reads with some quite personal purpose. It may be to acquire some power. It can be out of hatred for the author.” And it’s fair to say that you can only arrive at these emotions after you’ve spent a while figuring out the genre for yourself. The reasons will differ widely between readers. You may read these stories so that you can cross a title off a list and say so, even if it’s just to a hypothetical interlocutor in your head. Maybe you’re starting to write your own stories, and you see yourself as “a wildcat miner drilling out resources that are shrinking,” in David Brin’s words, which means that you have to see what your predecessors have done for the sake of competitive advantage. You might be reading them solely with an eye to picking them apart. And you might even simply be reading these authors because you’ve heard from multiple sources that you’ll enjoy the hell out of the experience. None of these motivations is better than any other, and they probably only achieve their true strength in combination. But reading the stories of the past is just one aspect, and not always the most important one, of a reading life that can hardly help but assume its own unique, necessary form.

And along the way, something strange happens. If you’ve remained true to yourself, followed your nose, and expressed strong opinions in advance of having the knowledge to back them up, you discover that you’re part of a conversation that has been going on since long before you were born. The test for admission isn’t the mastery of any particular list of stories, but the fact of having been a certain kind of twelve year old—and it’s never too late to begin. Unlike most conversations, much of it took place in print, so you’ll eventually want to investigate what has been said before you arrived on the scene. You may not see much of yourself in the writers you discover, and they might not have seen much of themselves in you, but you also have more in common with them than you will with anyone else. Maybe you’ll only dig a little, or not at all, or maybe you’ll dig so deeply that it becomes an obstacle to your development in itself. But you’re building up an inner life that won’t look like any other, and you’ll spend much of it raiding other writers for parts. Sooner or later, I think, most readers realize that there are useful components that they won’t find if they confine themselves to the obvious: it’s how I felt when I discovered A.E. van Vogt, whom I never would have read if I hadn’t made a conscious effort to seek out these older stories. It will probably be someone else for you, and I can’t tell you who it will be or where to begin, although I’m happy to give you a list if you want it. All that matters is that you become the reader you were meant to be, who is both utterly unlike and surprisingly similar to all those who came before you. Because the only future science fiction has ever been good at predicting is that of its own readers.

Hail to the King

“The golden age of science fiction,” the fan editor Peter Graham once wrote, “is twelve.” And it seems fair to say that the golden age of horror fiction comes shortly thereafter. If science fiction tends to take hold of the imagination of curious kids in search of stories in which intelligence is a means of empowerment, rather than isolation, they often latch onto horror in the years when middle school and the onset of adolescence send them looking for a kind of narrative that can put their terrors into a more tangible form. Between the ages of twelve and thirteen, I read so much Stephen King that it’s a wonder I had time to do anything else: at least fifteen novels in all, from Carrie to Needful Things. And I know that I’m not alone in saying that the best time to discover King is when you’re just a little too young for it to be appropriate. The recent rise in fiction geared exclusively toward young adults, which includes its share of horror titles, isn’t a bad thing, but it means that a teenager looking for interesting reading material is less likely to turn first to The Shining or The Stand. Which is a loss in itself—because I’ve come to realize that King, for me, wasn’t just a gateway drug into reading in general, but toward an especially valuable mode of fiction that I can only describe as modernist realism put into the service of more primal fears.

King has never ceased to produce bestsellers, but if his reputation continues to rest on a main sequence of early books—stretching roughly from ‘Salem’s Lot through It—this isn’t just a question of his having produced his best work in his youth. He was, and is, a writer of enormous talent, but he was also the right man at the right time. His most influential novels appeared in the mid- to late seventies, at a time when mainstream fiction was uniquely enterprising in turning the tools of modernist realism onto genre plots. The first category to take full advantage of that bag of tricks, not surprisingly, was the suburban sex novel: the difference between Peyton Place and Updike’s Couples is more one of style than of substance. A few earlier horror novels, notably Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, had covered some of the same ground, with meticulous, almost fussily detailed looks at upper-class households on the verge of crossing over into the supernatural, but King was the first to do it over multiple books. And it was a surpassingly good trick. King’s basic formula, with convincing observations of everyday life providing a backdrop for increasingly horrifying events, may seem obvious now, but surprisingly few other writers have pursued it consistently. (One exception is Peter Straub, whose Ghost Story is one of those late entries in a genre that has a way of codifying everything that came before.)

And much of King’s appeal comes from his ability to create what John Updike called “specimen lives,” with carefully constructed characters who turn out to be both timelessly interesting and emphatically of their era. King’s novels are rooted much more in the culture and politics of the seventies than we tend to remember. The Shining often reads like a haunted house story informed by Watergate, as when Stuart Ullmann smugly informs Jack Torrance that Wilson, Harding, Roosevelt, and Nixon all stayed in the hotel’s presidential suite: “I wouldn’t be too proud of Harding and Nixon,” Jack replies. And The Stand originated in a confluence of ideas that could only have occurred at a particular historical moment, as King recounts in Danse Macabre:

The story about the CBW spill in Utah…became entwined in my thoughts about Patty Hearst and the SLA, and one day while sitting at my typewriter…I wrote—just to write something: The world comes to an end but everybody in the SLA is somehow immune. Snake bit them. I looked at that for a while and then typed: No more gas shortages.

When we turn to his characters themselves, we find finely nuanced portraits of ordinary individuals who wouldn’t have been out of place in an Updike novel. Time has turned them into period pieces, but they’re as valuable, in their way, as the literary novels of the time, and the care that King lavished on assembling those mundane lives goes a long way toward explaining the power of the terror that follows.

Gradually, King strayed from that template, particularly as his own success made it more difficult for him to write convincingly about protagonists who weren’t members of the upper middle class. (The transitional novel here is It, in which nostalgia takes the place of reportage for the first time, and which a character observes of his friends: “And then there’s the passingly curious fact that you’re all rich.”) But those early novels—in which King fused the textured social observation of the seventies with something older and darker—stand as permanent landmarks, and when we look at lesser efforts in the same vein, we’re reminded of how hard it really was. One reason why Jaws reads so strangely today, as I’ve noted before, is that it’s an early attempt to fuse the slightly sordid air of a sexy bestseller with a monster story, and the two halves don’t work together: instead of allowing each piece to enhance the other, Benchley gives us a hundred interminable pages about Ellen Brody’s affair that never connect in satisfying ways to the action on the boat. King cracked the code in a way that Benchley didn’t, and a book like Pet Sematary is a master class in fusing a realistic psychological novel with a plot out of Poe. In time, both King and the culture around him moved on, and the artistic moment that produced his best novels seems to have passed. But the books still exist, for whatever teenagers or adults feel like seeking them out, and for lucky readers, they can still spark the kind of hunger that they once awoke in me.