Why I am smarter

Dear My Little Bloggy McBloggykins,

As a former English major and constant devourer of those papery stacks we scholars like to call books, (screw you kindle) I often grow frustrated with literary snobs. These are the jerk-faces who believe a writer must be dead for sixty years and have spent all time prior to this demise hiding in a closet, locked in a mental institution, or drunk in a pub near Oxford, in order for their work to be considered a ’classic’ or ’real art.’ Now, I’m all for drunk, old, bearded authors (Hemingway) or drunk, nutty, melancholic authors (Poe) but what rocket scientist decided that a book can’t be both enjoyable and well-written?

Fools, I say! That is why my favorite author is better than everyone else’s.

But who, Steinho? Who is your favorite author that by far surpasses the likes of petty bourgeoisie peasants like F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, winner of the Nobel Prize for boringness? What modern day wordsmith’s epic horror tomes have thrilled masses and crushed walnuts (seriously those books are huge) for the past forty years? Whose thrilling and bizarre tales of the macabre have been adapted into some of the most gasp-inducing horror flicks known to mankind? And as long as he doesn’t get hit by another van will likely continue to do so.

If you haven’t been living under a swamp log, you likely have already figured out I’m talking about Stephen King. With an imagination outmatched only by the likes of maybe H.P. Lovecraft (mental patient) King can take the most mundane ideas and turn them into a tale equal parts heart-wrenching and horrifying; both bloody and bloody hilarious.

Consider the first novel he wrote post getting hit by a van, “Dreamcatcher.” An interesting tidbit, King wrote this novel out entirely in long hand because he was still recovering from being eaten by a van and couldn’t sit in front of a typewriter. But I digress.

Speaking of motored vehicles doing inappropriate things, “Dreamcatcher happens to be the second King novel I’ve listened to in my car, the first ironically being “From a Buick 8,“ where an alien Buick eats the people inside it.

What, you say? Listening to a book while weaving through insane LA traffic??? You should be arrested! Well, driving is boring and I have to do it a lot for my current occupation. That’s why God invented the audio book.

Let me set up a little snippet of “Dreamcatcher.” All you need to know is that it’s about parasitic aliens. That grow in people’s rectums. So imagine, I’m speeding down Santa Monica Blvd. and I hear about a man sitting atop a toilet, trying to contain a long, red, spiky-toothed weasel worm that has just popped out of some hunter’s ass, and now wants to bite some other poor guys, and now wants to bite some other guy’s face off. Literally, a third dude walks in, and sees the guy on the toilet’s nose in the creature’s jagged toothy mouth, and wonders, is that actually a nose? Yes, sir. It is! The point is, King took a situation, a guy sitting on a toilet, passing noxious farts (a sign of impregnation by the heinous butt aliens) and makes it terrifying. He makes farts terrifying. The way he describes the monster eating its way through stomach and intestines and flesh before bursting forth from its gastrointestinal snuggie only to spring out like a deranged Jack-in-the-box and start gnawing faces, well, it nearly made me crash my Buick. And crack up. And grab my stomach in sympathy pain.

Lots of books can make you laugh or cry, but only Stephen King can make you afraid of a toilet. That is true brilliance.

And by the way, anyone who tells you Shakespeare wasn’t a guy just trying to make a buck is a liar. Sure, he was way talented, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t in the back of the Globe Theater with the rest of the guys in dresses and pumpkin pants, counting how many coins they weaseled out of the peasants.