ike me, most of my girlfriends spent a lot of their childhood reading. We spent hours in the library or sprawled on our beds, not watching the hours slip past. My girlfriends read books like the Narnia Chronicles and A Wrinkle in Time, worlds of adventure and pure imagination, or so I hear. I missed those books entirely, which I'm not exactly proud of. It's just the way things were. While the other girls read From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, I read Clive Barker's Books of Blood. I read trashy teen slasher paperbacks, and of course, I read Stephen King, whose first 20 novels I kept in chronological order on my bookshelf. My most prized possessions.

I loved the tales of mental unraveling. Misery, for instance. Or "Survivor Type," the short story in which a man on a deserted island resorts to eating his own fingers to stay alive. I wrote my own copycat versions: man trapped in building resorts to eating his own foot. It was gruesome, and weird, and if I were a kid writing it today, I'd probably be suspended and tossed to the nearest ineffectual school counselor. Instead, everyone tolerated it, with the idea that whatever I was purging needed to be purged.

I stopped writing horror stories in high school. I stopped reading them too. King became too prolific to keep up with. Besides, I had the literary canon to ponder. In what way does the author's use of irony convey the book's theme of isolation and despair? Good God, I had no idea. Especially since in 90% of the cases, I hadn't bothered to read the book. I wrote papers full of bullshit and $5 words and took whatever they gave me. What can I say? I was into guys.

All of this comes to mind because I just saw a movie called Donnie Darko. The first film from 27-year-old Richard Kelley, it's about a troubled teen who has visions of a six-foot rabbit portending the end of the world. Kind of like Harvey, but then nothing like Harvey, because unlike that sweet Jimmy Stewart confection, in which our likable hero turns the town wacky when he befriends an invisible bunny, Donnie Darko is unsettling, and bizarre, and blacker than the strong-ass coffee I'm drinking. It's also terrific, which is why I mention it here (and I hesitate to mention any more, because if you haven't seen it, I don't want to ruin anything). I'm late with this news of course; Donnie Darko came out last fall, and won the grand jury prize at last year's Sundance, and the star Jake Gyllenhaal already has a role in another reputedly great film, The Good Girl, which just opened. But Donnie Darko is so strange and beautiful and scary that it had me wanting to write horror again, for the first time since middle school. So after my decades-long hiatus, I offer you this plot twist: "And then he opened his slavering jaws and chomped down on her brain. Munch-munch-munch!"
How did I go 15 years not writing this stuff?

written in Baltimore, Maryland