A list of Stephen King novels that could be on the current events shelf, particularly in the US of A

Carrie - Prom is ruined

Salem's Lot - A man's old hometown is consumed by greedy monsters

The Shining - Self-isolation for beginners

Rage - It's always too soon for this joke

The Stand - The title in Swedish is "The Age of Pestilence"

The Long Walk - Reality TV distracts the populace from the corrupt regime

The Dead Zone - Somebody wants to shoot the president of the US?

Firestarter - The government locks up children

Roadwork - Okay this one's more always relevant

Cujo - Feral dog attacks are increasing

The Running Man - See The Long Walk, but with hijacked airplanes flying into skyscrapers

The Dark Tower series - We can change Roland's name to Greta

Christine - Self-driving car kills people

Pet Semetary - White man invades Native Americans' holy place, destroys himself and his friends and family

Cycle of the Werewolf - I think this one gets a pass. To be fair I barely remember it.

The Talisman - You won't believe how hard this 12 year old boy worked to pay for his mom's cancer treatment

The Eyes of the Dragon - Haven't read it, but it ties directly into The Dark Tower so

Thinner - White man gets away with killing Roma woman because he's friends with the judge, sacrifices wife and daughter to escape revenge

It - Monster pretends to be different things to prey on people's beliefs, eats children

Misery - Judging by what I read on Twitter today, George RR Martin had better put that book out soon if he knows what's good for him

The Tommyknockers - Freelance worker destroys herself, hometown to keep up with hustle economy

The Dark Half - Haven't read it

Needful Things - Something something consumer culture

Gerald's Game - Woman suffers for trusting man's unfounded confidence in his own sexual ability

Dolores Claiborne - Woman speaks uninterrupted for 300 pages, resulting in redemption

Insomnia - The world is run by two spirits of order and one of chaos. Okay, this one may have become irrelevant.

Rose Madder - A cop is a bastard

The Green Mile - Black man performs literal miracles to redeem himself, still gets executed for crime he didn't commit

Desperation - Small town consumed by cult

The Regulators - Haven't read it, but see above?

Bag of Bones - Writer isolates himself, solves old crime?

The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon - Getting lost in the woods is a popular pastime these days

Dreamcatcher - Under-qualified commander goes out of control when faced with situation he doesn't understand

Black House - This one gets a pass. Of course King is only co-author.

From a Buick 8 - The cops are keeping something secret. . .

The Colorado Kid - Haven't read it

Cell - Cellphone malware kills billions of people. Okay, this hasn't happened yet, but it feels more and more likely doesn't it.

Lisey's Story - Writer discovers new levels of escapism. Okay, this one may just be for us writers.

Blaze - Haven't read it

Duma Key - Several creatives are able to harness their disabilities to do great work, truly, a story of our time, except for the murderous ghosts

Under the Dome - Society run by a lying amoral monster is put under pressure cooker, soon explodes

11/22/63 - Man discovers time travel, tries shortcut to build ideal society, learns the fact that we're all stuck here with each other

And that's all I have read

Remember this spectacular bit of writing?

Someone wrote this. And published it. On paper.

I've finally made the effort of transcribing it, instead of making the effort to squint through it every time I want a laugh. (The real effort was abstaining from commenting on the text as I go.)

As Spikenard watched, Bronwyn slipped the transparent cloak from her shoulders; it fell with a whisper. She let her hands drop to her sides; she pulled her shoulders back and stood erect; feet apart, legs straight. This is what he saw:

Bronwyn standing pale and tall in the nervous light that shimmered through a vibrating canopy of green leaves. The shifting bands of milky light and emerald shadow made her seem luminous, transcendent, as though she were a tallow candle glowing beneath its own flame. Like a porcelain lantern. Like a curtain fluttering in a window at dawn. Like a ghost that came and went with the twilight and darkness, that first veiled and then revealed.

Her hair had the sheen of the sea beneath an eclipsed moon. It was the color of a leopard’s tongue, of oiled mahogany. It was terra cotta, bay and chestnut. Her hair was a helmet, a hood, the cowl of the monk, magician or cobra.

Her face had the fragrance of a gibbous moon. The secret of fresh snow. Her eyes were dark birds in fresh snow. They were the birds’ shadows, they were mirrors; they were the legends on old charts. They were antique armor and the tears of dragons. Her brows were a raptor’s sharp, anxious wings. They were a pair of scythes. Her ears were a puzzle carved in ivory. Her teeth were her only bracelet; she carried them within the red velvet purse of her lips. Her tongue was amber. Her tongue was a ferret, and anemone, a fox caught in the teeth of a tiger.

Her shoulders were the clay in a potter’s kiln. Her shoulders were fieldstones; they were the white, square stones of which walls are made. They were windows covered with steam. They were porcelain. They were opal and moonstone. Her neck was the foam that curls from the prow of a ship; it was a sheaf of alfalfa or barley; it was the lonely dance of the pearl-grey shark.

Her legs were quills. They were bundles of wicker, they were candelabra; the muscles were summer lightning, that flickered like a passing thought; they were captured eels or a cable on a windlass. Her thighs were geese, pythons, schooners. They were cypress or banyan; her thighs were a forge, they were shears; her thighs were sandstone; they were the sandstone buttress of a cathedral; they were silk or cobwebs. Her calves were sweet with the sap of elders; her feet were bleached bone; her feet were driftwood. Her feet were springs, marmosets or locusts; her toes were snails; they were snails with the shells of tears.

Her arms were a corral, a fence, an enclosure; they were pennants; they were highways. her fingers were incense. They were silver fish in clear water; they were the speed of the fish; they were the fish’s wake. They were semaphores; they were meteors.

Her spine was a snake. It was the track of a snake. It was the groove the water snake makes in the flossy mud of the riverbank. Her spine was a viper, an anaconda. It was the strength of the anaconda. It was the anaconda’s unknown hieroglyphic. Her spine was a ladder, a rod; it was a chair, a canal; it was a caravan. her buttocks were fresh-baked loaves; they were ivory eggs; they were the eggs of the lonely phoenix. They were a fist.

Her breasts were citrus; they were soapstone; they were bright cumulus and the smooth fingertips of Musrum. Her breasts were honeycombs and dew-beaded windows, or soft, sweet cheese. They were the twin moons of the earth. The nipples rose like mercury with her heat. They rose like monuments atop flowered hills, above deserts of hot sand; the nipples were savory morsels, with the flavor of the forest.

Her ribs were a niche, an alcove, an apse; her stomach was an idol in the niche, alcove or apse, an effigy, a phantom. Her stomach was a beach, a savannah, a flagstone warmed by the sun, a cat asleep on the flagstone, a bleached canvas sail in hot southern winds. Her navel winked like a doll’s eye, like the eye of a whale, like the drowsy cat.

Her pubes were a field of wheat after the harvest, a field neatly furrowed; it was a nest, a pomegranate, an arrowhead, a rune. It was a shadow. It was moss on a smooth white stone. There was an orchid within the moss. There was a drop of dew upon the orchid.It had the breath of moss-beds, of the deep seas, of the abyss, of scrimshaw and blue glass, of cold iron; she had the sex of rain forests, the ibis and the scarab; she had the sex of mirrors and candles, of the hot, careful winds that stroke the veld,  the winds that taste of clay and seed and blood; the winds that dreamed of tawny, lean animals.

“You are quite beautiful, Princess Bronwyn,” Spikenard sang, with his sardonic grin and eyes as violet and hard as amethysts. “Your body is halfway between eath and dream, neither magic nor elemental, neither animal nor spirit.”

His long fingers reached toward her face, brushed her eyelids…

“Your eyes are the sound of rain.”

…followed the contours of her cheekbones and jaw…

“Chalkbeds and moonlight.”

Optic Drugs Attack Waffles #9

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You know what marketers say about a life unexamined

I sometimes get paid tiny amounts of money to answer marketing surveys. To me, it's a duty to fuck with marketers and keep them on their toes and prove to them there are people out there who will never fall for any of their bullshit. And sometimes you run into these delightful forms that make you question everything you think you know about the structure of reality and stuff, like today's survey about my use of fake meat in cooking. (I try to limit my meat intake but I do that by leaving meat out, not replacing it with more expensive fake stuff. There was no place in the 25+ page survey for me to say this.)

In between questions about brand name awareness (none), what colors I associate with vegetarian food packaging (none) and how much I agree or disagree about everything from the danger of gene modification (none) to the importance in upholding food traditions (none), there was a question that read,

Rank your top five out of the following groups of concepts:

1. Results, success, commencement
2. Independence, freedom, self-sufficiency
3. Modesty, hometown, tradition
4. Security, harmony, safety
5. Trendmaking, uniqueness, attraction
6. Responsibility, discipline, order
7. Flexibility, openness, innovation
8. Competence, knowledge, information
9. Superiority, regard, power
10. Friendship, confidence, trust
11. Imagination, humor, ease
12. Justice, morality, honesty
13. Adventure, passion, fascination
14. Health, vitality, durability

I'm like, okay, 10, 11, 12, 13 and then 7. If you put a gun to my head maybe I'd have to reconsider that order, and 2, 5 and 14 may have a place there as well. It's not that hard to figure out. But why? Why group those concepts? Why list those groups? Did a neural net construct this survey, is it the product of some inhuman hand with access to a dictionary but no concept of meaning? It's like, well.

It's in fact like this dream I had when I was about six years old. On my way to school, I walked through this little residential neighborhood that was like another world. Instead of the concrete monoliths where I lived, with space for playgrounds in between them, there were these tiny fairy tale houses littering narrow winding streets dwarfed between many large thorny hedges. So I dreamed about a wild, winding, churning, mist-covered hedge maze with secret gardens hiding cottages with witches and fairy godmothers living in them. A little dangerous, but mostly strange and wonderful. A storybook world of infinite adventure. You may see some traces of this here and there in my work if you look real hard.

But this most powerful, transformative childhood trauma doesn't usually come up in my daily life. I felt a little of it watching Inside Out. I think that was the last time, until now.