What Stephen King Isn't

One summer, when I was nine or ten, I inherited a few thousand science-fiction and horror paperbacks from a friend of my mother’s. Over the next few months, in our damp and cobwebby basement, I raced through this library of slim, yellowing paperbacks from the fifties, sixties, and seventies, half of them with sexy space girls on their covers. There were mentalist sci-fi novels like “Dune” and “The Stars My Destination”; horror books with titles like “Night Thirst” and “The Howling”; genre-mixing novels about robot detectives, space cowboys, and galactic emperors. Some of these novels were bad, and others were great, but it didn’t matter—the main thing was that they were all defiantly and originally weird. It was the most mind-bending summer ever.