Richard Blow

Then I read that Stephen Glass was about to publish a novel called “The Fabulist” — and would appear on “60 Minutes” to promote his book, promising to explain what had led him to deceive me and so many others he worked for and wrote about. And the rush of emotions that I’d felt five years before roared right back: frustration, regret, anger, suspicion. Could I trust that Glass really wanted to apologize? Or was he merely trying to silence a potential critic before his novel’s publication?

To really understand why the story of Steve Glass still causes such pain, you have to know that making up facts was only part of what Glass did to his colleagues. We opened ourselves to him, and in turn he probed our minds, pinpointing our vulnerabilities, our vanities, our prejudices. He exploited the worst in us and betrayed the best. And then he just vanished — until now. Now he’s back, promoting a tale of fall and redemption.

I first met Glass sometime in 1997. Based in New York, I was in charge of assigning Washington stories for George, and part of my job was to scout D.C. for new writers. It’s actually a tough job; the city contains many fine reporters and polemicists, but few gifted feature writers. Washington generates little color in its culture or its prose. Steve Glass, however, was a splash of exuberance against a backdrop of gray monuments and gray newsprint. His pieces in the New Republic were characterized by the wonderfully oddball anecdote — young Republicans behaving obscenely in a hotel room, financiers who’d created a shrine to Alan Greenspan, cult worshippers of Paul Tsongas. Somehow, Glass discovered people who acted like inside-the-Beltway residents imagined normal Americans behaved. Wacky, loony, real people.

But his articles weren’t always lighthearted. The article that first attracted Steve attention was about a young black man holding up a D.C. cabbie, a crime that happened to take place while Steve was in the taxi. For Harper’s, he wrote an essay about a summer job as a phone psychic, suggesting that the psychic hot line had particular appeal to blacks. In Steve’s portrayal, they came across as more pathetically needy for psychic advice than whites were, and more gullible too. The piece had a seductive appeal to neo-liberal sympathies; these hot lines duped poor, uneducated minorities just as much as, say, lotteries did.

I assigned Steve three stories, two of which George published. One was about the power of celebrity lobbyists. I wanted Steve to show that celebrities were effective — the story wasn’t a story if they weren’t — and he came through, digging up a Virginia political consultant who’d studied this very question. According to this source, legislation supported by celebrities was 10 times more likely to be voted into law than that which wasn’t. Steve had found the money shot statistic; it made the story not just entertaining, but important.

Next, Glass profiled Bill Clinton’s friend, power lawyer Vernon Jordan. The timing was right after the outbreak of the Lewinsky scandal, and I was anxious to dig up some dirt on Jordan, who was mired in Clinton’s shenanigans but doing a masterly job of foiling the press. Once more, Steve scored. He described Jordan pacing anxiously at his law firm, wearing out the carpet underneath an oil painting of himself. A great image; Steve said he got it from colleagues of Jordan’s who wished to remain anonymous. Glass also discovered several women who claimed — anonymously as well — that Jordan was a boorish lech. “I always wear a bra around Jordan,” one woman admitted. “Otherwise he stares at my tits.”

The whole thing made my boss, John Kennedy, queasy. When he read the Jordan piece, he pressed me about whether the ribald details were really true. I assured him that they must be; Steve Glass was a good reporter. So, against his better judgment, John signed off on the piece.

Steve, meanwhile, was getting more and more buzz, writing more and more freelance pieces. Rolling Stone wanted him; so did GQ; even the prestigious New York Times Magazine was signing him up. How did he do it? I once asked Steve. How did he find the time to do all this reporting and writing and go to Georgetown Law School at night?

His answer explained everything. He had insomnia, he told me. He only needed three, maybe four hours of sleep a night. From midnight to 4 a.m., while his girlfriend slept, Steve would write. It was the perfect time. No one to bother you. He could really get a lot done. I wish I had insomnia like that, I thought. Think of how productive I could be!

Steve’s third story for George was a profile of conservative editor and writer John Podhoretz, who was reputed to be a crotchety boss. Glass confirmed it; he unearthed a group of ex-Podhoretz wage slaves who convened at a D.C. bar every week to swap horror stories about their despised former overseer. Their yarns were pretty juicy. Podhoretz, I thought, must be a real jerk.

The story was a little rough, though. Steve would have to do another draft. But that was never a problem; Steve was a delight to edit. I’d call him about a manuscript, and as soon as I said hello he’d blurt, “You hate it, don’t you? It’s terrible, I know. I’m so sorry. I know. It’s awful. Just kill it. Really. I won’t mind.”

He was disarming, like a little kid who’s pissed off at himself; you couldn’t help reaching out, reassuring him that everything would be OK. “Steve, it’s great,” I’d say. “It just needs a little tweaking.”

“You really like it?” he would ask, his voice brightening. “Really?”

I would chuckle gently and feel quite the sage — which, of course, Steve had surely discerned was exactly what I wanted to feel like. He had a way of making you feel good about yourself. That was one reason why everybody liked Steve Glass. And he told you what you wanted to hear. Steve knew that I was irritated by a steady stream of catty items the New Republic had run about George, and so he fed me a steady stream of bilious gossip about TNR. This editor was a pompous bore; no one took that writer seriously. I felt dirty for enjoying the gossip, but I never asked him to stop dishing it.

Before I could reach Steve to discuss the Podhoretz piece, we all found out how he had been getting such great stuff. He was making it up. A Forbes.com journalist named Adam Penenberg tried to follow up on a Glass story in the New Republic, only to find that none of it was real. In short order, TNR editor Chuck Lane fired Glass, and subsequent investigations showed that Steve’s fabrications went way back, numbering in the dozens. At George, the Jordan piece simply blew apart like a dandelion in a strong wind. The day the news broke, I did some hasty rechecking of facts. In Glass’ notes, I found the names of his lawyer sources, the ones Glass had asked us not to call because they feared talking to anyone but him. A bewildered night operator at Vernon Jordan’s law firm informed me that there were no lawyers there by that name. The Podhoretz profile was also bunk. We fired Glass, too.

Our head fact checker, a hardworking young man who took his job seriously, who needed his job — the kind of guy working his way up the journalistic ladder whom Glass had nimbly leapfrogged over — was distraught, terrified that he would get fired but even more devastated because to him, the idea of truth in reporting mattered, and Glass’ conduct was something he simply could not fathom.

A day or so after losing his job, Glass returned to his parents’ home outside Chicago and simply disappeared. I was among those frantically trying to find out what was going on — the details were still murky — and to ask which facts in our stories might be false. There were legal issues to consider, apologies to write; we needed his help. Only once did I get through. In a fragile, quavering voice, Steve hinted to me that his parents feared for his life. “Someone’s with me all the time, I can’t talk now,” he said, and hung up.

I have never talked with him since.

Rechecking Steve’s work, painstaking though it was, proved to be the easy part of picking up the pieces. Much harder was the soul-searching Steve’s betrayal prompted. How had he played me so exquisitely, duped me so utterly? I imagined the contempt Steve must have felt as I praised him for scoops he knew were transparently fake. How could he not lose respect for someone so easily fooled? And fooled because Steve saw what was shallow and weak in me — my editorial vanity; my silly anger at the New Republic; my salacious desire to get something on Vernon Jordan.

I had to work to acknowledge the depths of my responsibility for publishing lies. It was painful, but I hope I’m a better journalist and a better person for it. Steve Glass, however, found his way to that dark spot in my soul with unnerving facility. He discovered it and then he exploited it. Just as he did with other editors — and thousands of readers — when portraying a black thug robbing a cabbie, or a black woman falling prey to a pseudo-psychic, or a denizen of red state America insipid enough to belong to the Church of George Herbert Walker Bush.

And this is really the main reason why those of us who worked with Steve find it so hard to forgive him. Instead of using his gifts to try to make the world a better place, Steve mined the crudest raw material of our fallible human natures. And then he put it all on paper, where it could inflict tangible, long-lasting harm on people who hadn’t done anything wrong, and ran away.

You see why forgiving Steve Glass doesn’t come easy.

So it was with both optimism and trepidation that I turned to “The Fabulist.” Some who knew Glass are outraged that Simon & Schuster has published the book, as if Glass shouldn’t even get the opportunity to plead his case. Having once myself come under fire for publishing a book about my days at George, I sympathized with Steve in this regard. In his case, I thought, If we believe in redemption, don’t we have to permit its means? Glass had every right to publish this book, and Simon & Schuster did nothing wrong in publishing it. The question I wanted to know is, Had Glass used his opportunity wisely?

“The Fabulist” is surely one of the strangest books I’ve ever read. It comes wrapped in minimalist packaging: a simple white cover with black type that reads, “The Fabulist — A Novel — Stephen Glass.” It seems to suggest that the book is the plain, unvarnished, no-bullshit story, and the only baggage it carries is that which the reader brings to it. It also lacks an author photo, another cryptic touch. Whoever heard of a first novel without a picture of the writer? A Simon & Schuster spokeswoman told me that the omission was “a style choice. We wanted to let the book speak for itself.” Maybe. But to those of us who know Steve, this all feels painfully familiar, as if “The Fabulist” is not merely a book, but a stratagem. Like Steve himself — or, I should say, like Steve when I knew him — it is coy, flirtatious, manipulative even as it pretends to candor. The whiteness is a blank canvas upon which to project our own biases, just as Steve was.

Inside, things only get stranger. “The Fabulist” begins with a prefatory note from Glass: “I was fired in 1998 from my job as a writer at The New Republic — for having fabricated dozens of magazine articles. I deeply regret my misconduct, and the pain it caused.” But while the following novel is “inspired by certain events in my life,” it should not be confused with nonfiction. Like the cover says, it’s a novel.

But it sure reads like real life. “The Fabulist” tells the story of an up-and-coming young journalist named, yes, Stephen Glass. Our antihero works at the Washington Weekly, a doppelgänger New Republic, described as a political magazine whose specialty is the hatchet job. “They used the source’s own words to hang him,” Glass writes. (They?) “It was assisted suicide, not murder.” But it is Glass who is hanged by his own words when he is discovered to have published fiction posing as nonfiction (this in a work of nonfiction posing as fiction). He is promptly fired by his boss, Robert Underwood, an obvious stand-in for Chuck Lane. Soon after, Glass’ girlfriend dumps him. Chased by bloodthirsty media vultures, he flies home to his parents, who love him regardless and fear that he is going to commit suicide.

Up to this point, the story, as far as I know, nearly exactly parallels reality — which raises the obvious question why Glass didn’t simply write a memoir. Did he think that a novel would sell better? That no one would ever again believe his nonfiction? Or are there things in “The Fabulist” for which he does not want to take responsibility?

Eventually, Glass returns to “Jeffersonville,” Va. — Arlington, one presumes. In search of love, he tries to date a stripper and visits a rub-and-tug massage parlor with his brother. This Glass may be spineless, but he’s impressively virile in the sack. His real embrace, however, lies elsewhere. Glass takes a job in a video store — see how far he has fallen! — receives spiritual instruction from a rabbi who forgives without asking questions, and meets a girl who loves him without asking questions. But in time, Glass realizes that Washington will never forgive him. And so he heads up 1-95 to New York — and a new fictional life.

I suspect that there is considerably more imagination applied to the reconstruction than to the fall. For one thing, Glass omits the fact that he finished law school at Georgetown and worked at a D.C. firm. Is this because a law degree isn’t the stuff of exciting fiction? Or because real-life Steve Glass looks somewhat less pathetic — and consequently harder to feel sorry for, harder to forgive — if we know that, actually, he didn’t lose everything.

Is “The Fabulist” interesting for nonmedia addicts? It does contain sporadic moments of clever invention. The story that leads to Glass’ exposure is about “angry lottery winners” who’ve become so addicted to spending their winnings, they plunge into debt. Much later, Glass’ new girlfriend turns out to have a sordid past of her own; she’s a gambling addict. But one expects such clever touches from Steve Glass; they’re just the sort of thing he used to make up in his articles. I suspect that those with more remove from his tale than I have will find this all a bit thin gruel.

Which leads us to the real question: Is it a successful apologia? Glass seems to hope so; the book is peppered with apologies. “What I did was a terrible mistake …” Or: “My only purpose here is to answer your question … and perhaps to ask your forgiveness …” In an interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail, Glass professed that he hopes his former colleagues will see the book as “an exercise in remorse and redemption.”

It doesn’t help Glass’ case that he devotes at least as many words to excoriating other members of the press as he does to self-flagellation. He portrays the New Republic as a cynical, venal institution read only by senior citizens (another group Glass has fun with). Chuck Lane is presented as an insufferable dullard pathetically desperate to build himself up by tearing Glass down. I don’t know Lane well and have no idea whether he fits these descriptions, but for Glass to smear Lane (and several other ripped-from-the-bylines characters) and then protest, “Hey, it’s only fiction,” is cowardly — as cowardly as running away was in the first place. Taking responsibility is a burden he wants to shed before he has even shouldered it.

The theme of hyperambition posing as righteous anger is one that Glass applies to the media in general. It’s not that we were genuinely upset by his actions; we just want to get a good article out of Glass. “They’re going to write about me, and write about me viciously,” he says. There’s a grain of truth in this — a very small grain. Glass misses the larger point. We were genuinely upset, and because of that, we will write articles about what happened. This is what writers do. We write because we believe that we have something to say — rather than something to make up.

Glass may think the media sleazy, but at least, he suggests, ordinary Americans have their priorities straight. “Most people, people who are not journalists, care about their jobs, their families, and that’s what they should care about,” Glass writes. And so he gets along extremely well with people of color, like the Latino janitor at the Washington Weekly (whom he knows only by a demeaning nickname) and the borderline mentally retarded, like the video store employees he manages (manipulates?) better than anyone has before him. (“Amazingly, they had managed to rent two videos in my absence … “) Coming from a man who used to parody those same ordinary Americans in the pages of an elite magazine — and whose book contains more such parodies — this newfound appreciation for Babbitry takes some nerve. Or maybe it’s something else. Glass’ ability to apologize while simultaneously insisting that his wrongs were trivial; his sneering portrayal of journalists even as he begs our forgiveness; his insistence that his book is fiction even as he asks you to believe that his repentance is real; all this goes beyond chutzpah into self-delusion. Part of Steve Glass wants to give the world the finger; an equal part just wants to be hugged.

In the end, the more Glass’ apologies pile up, the more perfunctory they feel. It’s as if Glass knows this is what’s expected of him before he can progress through the cultural cycle of exposure, exile, repentance and rehabilitation. Unfortunately for the author, we still expect that repentance to be sincere — and the very act of apologizing in a novel makes Glass’ integrity suspect. Even Glass hints that his apologies are pointless. “You’ll never be sorry enough for the journalists,” Glass’ heroic brother tells him. (Glass paints characters positively in exact proportion to the degree they unconditionally forgive him.) “You’ll never win them back and get into their good graces again, not in this life. You could work harder at good deeds than Mother Teresa, and you’ll still be the fabricator.”

It’s safe to say that Glass hasn’t tested the veracity of that assertion. But as one of those potential forgivers, I’d like to take him up on it. What would it take for me to forgive Steve Glass? Nothing so saintly, actually. He’ll probably need to do more than just write me a letter. He could start by actually apologizing to everyone who was ever hurt by what he wrote and what he did — individually. In person, if possible. Maybe he could pay back the money he accepted from magazines for the stories he made up. By defrauding his employers, Glass essentially stole that money — and with this book, he’s compounding the original theft. He could donate some cash to the Columbia School of Journalism for a course or a lecture series on journalistic ethics. To say that there’s no point in even trying seems terribly convenient.

Earning forgiveness isn’t impossible, but it is hard. For forgiveness to mean anything, it should come hard. But even now, five years after his banishment, Glass just doesn’t want to do the work. He may call himself a novelist instead of a journalist, but has Steve Glass truly changed?

Better, King suggested, to lower the curtain on a truly dramatic career.

For legions of fans addicted to devouring a new King tome every six months or so, his self-exile would be a devastating loss. But they should not abandon all hope. King has spoken of retirement before, and his agent, Arthur Green, told the Associated Press, “I think it’s unlikely he’ll stop working.”

King’s retirement may be unlikely, but it’s not a bad idea. In fact, it’s a great idea. Truth is, King hasn’t reached the point of recycling; he’s been recycling for years. His fans may not want to admit it, but Stephen King’s most recent books are dull, dreary, repetitive, unoriginal, uninspired hack work. And the best thing — perhaps the only thing — that King can do about it is to stop writing.

Don’t think I enjoy saying that. I’ve been reading King novels over the course of three decades now, and I’ve never felt apologetic about doing so — never felt defensive about his, shall we say, unpolished literary gifts, or the validity of the horror genre, or what my love for his talents said about my own maturity and mental health.

For me, getting scared by King was one of life’s necessary escapes. I remember buying “Salem’s Lot” from a supermarket checkout rack when I was 12 years old. I read the book, which is about vampires taking over a small Maine town, in the bedroom of a lonely, creaky house on the wind-buffeted tip of an Atlantic island. My bedroom was the only one on its floor, and I would read the book before going to sleep. When I turned the lights off and the wind-blown branches scraped against my curtainless window, I’d shiver and wonder if, just possibly, just maybe, there weren’t vampires scratching the glass with their dirty fingernails, begging to be let in, longing to feed … on me.

I imagine anyone who’s read a Stephen King novel has experienced a similar moment where, if only briefly, horror and reality blur. The unsettling force of King’s powers of persuasion — maybe there really are monsters outside the window — has sent some readers I know scurrying back to the more secure, high-walled realms of highbrow literature. Others, like me, get hooked on the intensity of being scared, the adrenaline of terror. We are safely scared, though. We know that when we finish a King novel, the worst terrors will have been averted, the protagonists will be victorious (though not usually without casualties) and in any case, our own problems are not nearly as horrible as what happens to the characters in King-world.

And so, after racing through “Salem’s Lot,” I read gleefully on, back to King’s first novel, “Carrie,” a pulp classic, then forward to “The Shining,” which I read in the backseat of a station wagon while a friend’s mother drove a fellow ninth-grader and me to Walt Disney World. Thanks to King, I didn’t know the streets of my own suburban hometown until I got my driver’s license and was required to look out the window.

With memorable characters and strong plots, “Carrie” and “The Shining” were great reads. So were subsequent books such as “Firestarter,” “The Dead Zone,” “The Stand,” “The Talisman” and “It.” They featured a variety of terrors: telekinesis, a haunted hotel, Satanic villains. But all of them worked because King recognized our most basic fear: that some monster, figurative or literal, will invade our daily existence and deprive us of our opportunity to seek — and find — happiness. As in that old horror myth about the threatening phone calls that turn out to be made from the attic, the real monsters in King’s fiction lie very close to home: In both “Carrie” and “The Shining,” for example, the greatest violence is inflicted by the protagonists’ parents.

“Horror” was always a reductive label for King’s work, for all its guts and gore; his best books are more like Gothic tragedy, in which fulfillment is yanked away from characters just as they think they’ve finally found it. In “Carrie,” Carrie White’s chance to become accepted by her high school peers is cruelly stolen from her just as she’s finally allowed herself to trust the possibility of happiness. Naturally, much death and destruction result.

In “The Dead Zone,” John Smith — King likes everyman names — meets the girl of his dreams, only to lose her the very same night when a car crash plunges him into a prolonged coma. For Larry Underwood in “The Stand,” tragedy comes just as the Huey Lewis-like rocker has finally found his personal Jesus: a hit single. Unfortunately, even as his song is climbing the charts, a deadly virus is wiping out 99.8 percent of the population. Not good for sales.

The real intruders in King books aren’t usually so grandiose as a plague. His genius — yes, he did have a kind of genius — was his intuitive understanding that, more than any imagined monster, it’s the terrors of everyday life that truly frighten. Poverty. Cancer. Alcoholism. Spousal abuse. The loss of a child, as in “Pet Sematary.”

His happy endings were what made King so redemptive. By creating monsters who could be slain, King always gave his characters — and his readers — a way to fight back, a happy (or at least a bittersweet) ending; he helped us put a stake in the vampires scratching at our window. Stephen King gave his readers hope.

It’s hard to say exactly where King lost his way, but at some point in the late 1980s, his books became increasingly less distinctive. I remember his early works vividly. But I can’t name a character from “The Tommyknockers,” “Gerald’s Game,” “Insomnia,” “Rose Madder,” “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” “Needful Things” or “The Langoliers.” In those second-tier works, plots and themes were repeated from earlier, better King books, and characters became types rather than people. How could they not, really? By this point King was well into double-digit novel production. Judging by his sales, his fans didn’t seem to care that the books were less and less compelling. Why should he?

King’s most interesting books of the 1990s give some hint as to what might have been going on. In one way or another, they all focus on the horrors of literary success beyond his wildest imagination. In “The Dark Half,” King’s protagonist is a bestselling writer whose sadistic doppelganger comes to life when he tries to stop writing. In “Misery,” another bestselling writer is taken hostage by a rabid fan, who disapproves of the writer’s attempt to kill off a serial character. And in “Bag of Bones,” yet another bestselling writer stops writing.

It’s never a good sign when a writer gives up writing about the problems in his readers’ lives and starts writing about the burdens of success. King is said to have an excellent relationship with his many readers, but the evidence that he feels harassed by his large, loyal and hungry fan base (are the fans the real bloodsuckers?) is ubiquitous.

Consider the series of questions and answers his Web site, StephenKing.com, provides for fans. “Will he read my manuscript?” Nope. “To avoid any litigation problems, he has been advised by his agents not to look at any manuscript that has not been accepted by a publisher.” Does he accept story ideas? “To avoid any litigation problems, he has been advised … ” Can he help find an agent? “There being some legal problems with this … ” You get the picture. King has built a tall, spiked, wrought-iron fence around himself, and hung a “Beware of (Rabid) Dog” sign on it.

Or maybe his devoted readers built it for him. It’s hard not to be sympathetic to King’s plight — at least as sympathetic as one can be to a writer who’s earned over one hundred million dollars in his career. I do not doubt that people exist who, in a bogus attempt to make a fast buck, would claim that King read and stole their story idea. And the nature of King’s material pretty much guarantees that some of his readers are going to be a little, well, odd.

Still, one gets the feeling that King’s efforts at isolation are about more than legal concerns. King feels so imposed upon by his audience that he has to tell them, in books such as “Misery,” to back off — they’re losing their grip on reality. They have become the ones scaring him.(And there are a lot of more of them than of King.) But it doesn’t work: The readers make even these passive-aggressive books massive bestsellers. So King resorts to less artistic forms of self-defense.

A couple years ago, my sister and brother-in-law spotted King at a Washington, D.C., restaurant. (With his spiky black hair, weirdly wide eyes, and semiskeletal features, he’s pretty distinctive.) Thinking that I might like an autograph, they approached him and said politely, “Excuse me — are you Stephen King?” A little intrusive, perhaps, but not terribly; my siblings are polite people, and distinctly non-threatening.

King looked at them, uttered a flat “No,” and turned away. End of conversation.

My siblings wouldn’t have been offended if King had declined their request for an autograph. What startled them was that he was rude and dishonest to people who, for all he knew, had done nothing other than contribute to his children’s college tuition fund. Unless you’re in the Sex Pistols, showing contempt for your fans is never good marketing strategy.

For any writer, however, death is a great career move, and in June 1999 King almost obliged. While walking down a country road in Maine, he was hit by a van driven by one Bryan Smith — a very King-like name — who was, at the time he hit King, reaching into the backseat to push his Rottweiler, Bullet, away from a cooler of meat. (His other Rottweiler was named Pistol.)

In King’s subsequent recounting of the story, Smith was semi-coherent when he came to find the man he’d hit, appearing not to realize what he’d done. With his normal name, odd behavior and scary dogs, Smith resembled one of Stephen King’s deranged characters. Or one of his fans. Increasingly, they’re the same thing.

The bad news is that King was nearly killed. The good news, for King, was that the experience prompted the arbiters of elite culture to consider him with a new generosity. A recovering King became the critics’ darling. Soon King was mingling with a more sophisticated breed of fan — not the kind who picks up a cheap paperback at the supermarket and throws it into her cart with the Jif and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but the kind of reader who might avidly devour the New Yorker profile of King, then hide his books when guests came over for supper.

In 2000, the New Yorker also invited King to grace its 75th anniversary series of author readings. Following trendy short story writer Matt Klamm at the grunge-chic Bowery Ballroom, King made what he said was his first public appearance after the accident. Leaning heavily on a cane, he hobbled on stage looking frail and vulnerable and surprisingly old. The audience gave him (rather ironically, I thought) a standing ovation. King promptly announced that the battered glasses he was wearing were the same ones that he’d worn on the day of the accident. They’d been knocked off in the collision and landed, strangely, in the front seat of Smith’s van. The crowd loved this gruesome detail — as King knew it would. I couldn’t help but wonder if it were true.

Not coincidentally, the same tidbit shows up in “On Writing,” a combination writing manual/literary biography King published in 2000. “The frames were bent and twisted, but the lenses were unbroken,” King wrote. “They are the lenses I’m wearing now, as I write this.” What, I thought, did those glasses represent to King?

Being hit by a van could have been — should have been — King’s midlife heart attack, the sign from above that tells the victim, Hey, there’s more to life than the daily grind. Instead, in “On Writing,” King details how, five weeks after the accident, he began writing again. He set up his trusty Powerbook, propped himself up next to a fan, and wrote for an hour and 40 minutes before the pain in his hip got too great. “When it was over, I was dripping with sweat and almost too exhausted to sit up straight in my wheelchair.”

Although I suspect it’s a composite story, an artificial narrative, it’s certainly a moving one; King hadn’t gone five weeks without writing since, probably, he knew how to write, and the experience of sitting before the keyboard and staring at an empty screen after such an unwanted interruption must have been terrifying. The description of it — as with all of King’s portrayals of the writer’s life — certainly is.

The work that followed, however, was less successfully realized. His first novel after the accident was “Dreamcatcher,” the story of four men hunting in Maine woods when aliens invade. The men fight back, using telekinesis that they have possessed since adolescence — traces of “Carrie” — when they intervened to save a mentally retarded child from bullies.

“Dreamcatcher” is over 700 pages long, and it is incomprehensible. It reads like a jumbled, slapped-together collage of King’s past work. The aliens? “Tommyknockers.” Lost in the woods? “Tom Gordon” and “The Railroad.” The mysterious government forces who converge on the area to eradicate the invaders and all who’ve seen them? “Firestarter” and “The Stand.” It’s all been done before, by King himself — and better.

“Dreamcatcher” also suffers from embarrassingly flimsy efforts at characterization. The protagonists’ names are Beaver, Henry, Jonesy and Pete, which is taking the Everyman thing a little too far. It’s just lazy. These men have been barely introduced to us when the action kicks in, and when Beav and Pete get knocked off in the first hundred pages or so, it seems as if King himself doesn’t care about their fate. (And if he doesn’t, why should we?)

We’re left with Jonesy and Henry, who are so exactly alike — and so like so many other King heroes — that I couldn’t tell them apart through the next 500 pages. I’d keep reminding myself: “Henry, he’s the one with the alien in his head, that’s right.” Well, no. That was Jonesy.

And then there’s that problem of Duddits, the retarded boy with psychic powers. The simple savior is a recurring and weary trope in King’s fiction. Usually, however — and somewhat disturbingly — the saintly simpletons are black characters, pretty much the only black characters in King, such as the cook in “The Shining,” Speedy in “The Talisman” and Mother Abigail Freemantle, the Christ-like old woman in “The Stand.”

Or, sometimes, the black character and the mentally retarded character are merged into a sort of supersaint, such as the angelic John Coffey in “The Green Mile.” King is on shaky ground here. Could it be coincidence that Maine, his longtime home, has virtually no African-Americans? If King weren’t a well-known liberal, would we call these characterizations racist?

An incoherent plot, translucent characters, self-plagiarism — these are not the only flaws in “Dreamcatcher.” More worrisome for King in the long run is the pop culture problem. King is a baby boomer, and he’s always had a dead-on sense of middle-class boomer taste — which, I think, is one reason so many readers feel connected to King and his books. In his pages, they see themselves.

But in “Dreamcatcher,” I noticed something I’d never seen in King before: King’s middlebrow references felt dated and off-key. When an army of helicopter-flying hit men cue their soundtrack — hasn’t King seen any movies since “Apocalypse Now”? — the song they play is “Sympathy for the Devil.” Except that these days, it wouldn’t be. Our boys in Afghanistan aren’t playing Vietnam-era Stones. They’re listening to Outkast and Kid Rock.

If you like King, seeing him age like this is painful; it’s like watching a great athlete lose a step, or senior citizens try to boogie at a rockin’ wedding reception. King could fix the problem, but he’d have to work at it, and he’s no Tom Wolfe. In fact, he’s never really reported at all. His world comes from his experiences and his imagination. And when you spend every day of the year writing, as King has said he does, in a fenced-off house in an isolated state where it’s winter for about nine months of the year, and you’re cranking out books like a roomful of monkeys, you’re going to run low on original material. It’s just a matter of time. King only lasted longer than most.

“Dreamcatcher” was followed by “Black House,” a sequel to “The Talisman,” and if “Dreamcatcher” could have been chalked up to post-accident jitters, there’s no excuse for “Black House.” It’s an atrocious piece of work. (As “The Talisman” was, “Black House” was co-written with Peter Straub, but the book feels dominated by King.) Some of the problems are the same: flimsy characters, lazy plotting. There is only a token attempt to connect “Black House” to “The Talisman,” as if King has simply taken it for granted that if you’re reading the second, you read the first. Frankly, anyone who hadn’t read the first wouldn’t have a clue what was happening in the second.

It’s possible that King’s remarkable imagination — surely one of the most fertile in American literature — has finally grown barren. In both “Dreamcatcher” and “Black House,” he resorts to cheap vulgarity and violence far more repulsive and over-the-top than anything in his best books. “Dreamcatcher” features “shit-weasels” who grow in victims’ stomachs, then — after the victim suffers prolonged and odiferous farting — eat their way out of the victims’ anuses. (Okay, King also saw “Alien.”) How charming. The plot of “Black House” hinges on the cannibalization of young children; apparently the flesh of the buttock is the most tender. Even for a King fan, this is beyond the pale. It reeks of creative desperation and verges on pornography.

Ideally, the writer-reader relationship is a symbiotic one. But King seems to be taking his readers for granted. His impatience with the role of celebrity author and his new, post-Bryan Smith appreciation for life have made him resent all those demanding little people who made him rich and famous. In “On Writing,” King declares that “Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.” I’m not quite sure what that means, but it sounds to me like King needs to get a life.

Not knowing what else to do but write, and happy to keep the money pipeline open — “Black House” reads like a Hollywood sequel, manufactured solely to cash in on a far superior predecessor — King still keeps the books coming. Even if he stops now, he’s got enough manuscripts in the drawer for years of new material.

But he’s not writing. He’s shoveling, and asking us to grin and swallow it. Better for Stephen King to stop publishing altogether than to keep churning out crap, like a shit-weasel, eating its inexorable way through our insides, making us not King’s fans but his victims.

For such a reviled object, it is surprisingly unimposing. A brown obelisk maybe 30 feet high, the monument resembles a stone wall turned on end. Though nothing seems to grow on the farmland it overlooks, blackbirds still fly overhead, huge clouds of them filling the sky at dusk, blocking out the sun. To the Serbs, who lost the Battle of Kosovo, the birds represent the souls of slain Serbian warriors. Kosovars point to the two-headed black eagle that adorns the Albanian flag and claim the blackbirds as their own.

Serbs and Albanians live divided in Kosovo, separated by centuries-old hatreds and more recent bloodshed. Standing awkwardly between the two, compelled to prop up the very barriers of separation, are the bureaucrats and soldiers of the United Nations. More than a year after the NATO bombing, the world has turned its attention elsewhere. George W. Bush has even called for the return of the 7,000 American troops in the region. The U.N., meanwhile, is struggling to keep the peace in a desolate part of the world where violence has never been conquered.

A British journalist standing at the monument asks if I can translate the Serbian inscription on its front. With Serbia having erupted in protest against Milosevic, he’s writing a feature about the place where the Serbian leader launched his career. I can’t read Serbian, so he asks the two machine-gun-toting soldiers from the United Arab Emirates who guard the monument. In hesitant English they explain that they used to have a translation, but the previous day, somebody stole it.

I’m not surprised. Since NATO’s bombing halted Milosevic’s terror campaign, Kosovo’s Albanians have become the aggressor here, and language is one of their weapons. Serbian names for towns have been scratched out on virtually every road sign. New businesses proclaim themselves part of Kosova, using the Albanian word (pronounced Kuh-SO-va) for the territory. A few months ago, a Bulgarian soldier made the mistake of speaking Serbian to a group of Albanians, and they beat him to death.

The next day, I visit the Serbian Orthodox monastery in the Serbian enclave of Gracanica, about 15 minutes outside Pristina. To enter Gracanica one has to pass through a checkpoint manned by NATO’s Kosovo Force, or KFOR. A Swedish soldier carrying a machine gun checks cars. Behind him is a sandbag fort big enough to house a couple of soldiers, with peepholes to see and shoot out of. A tank looms over the fort.

Maybe half a mile down the pothole-strewn road, another guard stands outside the monastery’s front wall, and another tank is parked in its driveway. Inside the modest, graceful building, a nun, her face furrowed with age, peers over the shoulder of a young monk who is surfing the Internet. (The monks and nuns used to live apart, but now they share the monastery, for safety.)

Another Serb, a local politician, is talking hopefully about the Yugoslav election. He has family in Serbia, and he thinks they will be safe. “It will be OK,” he says. “The police, they are with us now.”

Days later, he was proved right. But both Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo have mixed feelings about the downfall of Milosevic. Most Serbs here supported Milosevic because they thought he stood up for them. The Albanians, of course, hate Milosevic, though his departure now worries them. Newly elected President Vojislav Kostunica takes an equally hard line against Kosovar independence and has done nothing about the hundreds of Albanians imprisoned in Serbian jails. U.N. officials say that while one path toward healing would be a Serbian apology, they don’t expect one to come from Kostunica.

Unfortunately for the Albanians, however, Kostunica isn’t the convenient boogeyman that Milosevic was. While Milosevic reigned, Kosovo automatically had the world’s sympathy. Not anymore. It’s easier to argue for independence when you’re trying to separate from a war criminal.

When the Serbian politician is done talking, the monk shows me the Orthodox chapel some 200 feet from the monastery. He is perhaps 23 or 24, with gentle eyes and a light brown beard. He wants to leave the monastery to teach theology, so that he won’t always be the youngest monk he knows. The church, he tells me, was built around 1320. In 1950, Marshal Tito honored it with a visit. A small stone structure that couldn’t hold more than 20 worshippers, it’s simple, beautiful, powerfully holy.

As he talks, an American soldier strolls by. He looks about 18, and his machine gun, which is about half his height, bounces against his hip as he walks.

I have come to Kosovo on the eve of the U.N.-sponsored municipal elections, which will be held Saturday, in the aftermath of Yugoslavia’s. Touring the countryside, I can see why the Kosovars are so angry. The Serbs destroyed about one in four homes in Kosovo, and the landscape is pockmarked with house after house reduced to piles of rubble — roofs gone, interiors decimated, maybe a wall or two partially intact. These were solid, durable homes made of brick, stone and cement. The Serbs knew their business.

One answer to the resulting housing problem was for returning Albanians to seize Serbian homes, but that has only perpetuated the hatred. An American diplomat told me of a Serbian man who fled Kosovo during the war, then returned to find his home occupied by an Albanian family. When they refused to leave, he asked an official at the U.N. Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) for an armed guard. To protect you while you try to get your home back? the official asked. No, the Serb said, to protect me while I burn it down.

More typical, however, is the sight of Albanians building, building, building. Everywhere you look new houses are springing up, surrounded by stacks of red brick and piles of the saplings the Albanians use as floor supports.

But the Albanians are also constructing walls of division, and these days it is the estimated 100,000 Serbs who remain in Kosovo who live in fear. Though international visitors can rarely tell a Serb from an Albanian by sight, Albanians can — and in most of Kosovo Serbs dare not walk alone. Not if they want to live.

After the bombing, under KFOR’s guard, some Serbs remained in Pristina, but the Albanians did their best to expel them. In one two-towered apartment building, Albanians lived on one side, Serbs on the other. Last winter the Serbian side was always dark, because the Albanians who run the power plant cut off its electricity. (Other Albanians cut the Serbs’ phone lines.) Winters in Kosovo are brutal. So the Serbs huddled in freezing apartments, because to step outside meant risking their lives.

Most of Kosovo’s Serbs have taken refuge in Serb-only enclaves scattered throughout the countryside — ghettos, some people call them. The enclaves are safer than Pristina, but they’re not really that safe. Albanians can drive through the enclaves, and a few weeks ago an Albanian man aimed his car at a group of Serbian children and hit the accelerator. He killed one and tried to kill another before speeding away. Not long after that, in a municipality called Obilic, someone threw a hand grenade into a Serbian playground, wounding several children.

Such acts may seem like random, arbitrary violence, but they aren’t. Murdering Serbian children is both an expression of the enduring hatred and a blow against the Serbs’ future in Kosovo. But ask an Albanian about such terrorism, and he is likely to explain, in all seriousness, that Serbs are killing their own children to make Albanians look bad.

“You have to understand, this is different from Bosnia,” one foreign worker said to me. “After four years of war there, they were really exhausted. They were ready for peace. But here there was a very short war with very few participants” — the Kosovo Liberation Army rebels were a small minority of Kosovo’s population — “and a lot of people are not at all sick of the violence.” He said this as a hopeful remark, implying that one day they will be.

In the municipality of Strpce, I get out of the car to photograph a particularly stark ruin. When I step off the road for a better angle, my guide slams on the horn. “Don’t walk on the grass,” she shouts. Thousands of unexploded mines still pollute the countryside. Another U.N. worker told me of an Albanian farmer who, thinking he was being helpful, walked toward two NATO soldiers, carrying a mine in his outstretched hands. “He’s gone,” one of the soldiers said. A second later, in a spray of red, he was.

After the NATO bombing, the Albanians returned the favor by mining some of the dirt roads in Serbian enclaves. So at considerable expense, UNMIK had to detonate the mines and pave the roads. More recently, UNMIK has been building roads that will allow Albanians to drive around the Serbian enclaves — which has had the ironic effect of making the divides of hatred even more enduring.

Ironic, but necessary. If the Serbs are to survive, UNMIK must isolate them and KFOR must guard them. “We are not trapped under the myth of multiethnicity,” one U.N. official explained. “NATO intervened to stabilize the region, not to strike a blow for social engineering.”

Among the many international personnel from UNMIK and various nongovernmental agencies I spoke with, frustration with (if not outright dislike of) the Albanians was nearly universal. This is partly because many Europeans have long considered Albanians the riffraff of the continent. But more than that, these U.N. workers speak the language of reason, of process and diplomacy, and they cannot comprehend the Albanians’ lust for revenge, their faith in the Serbs’ collective guilt, their self-serving interpretation of history.

One American said to me, “The Albanians think they’re the new chosen people,” as if the NATO bombings were the hand of fate pushing Kosovo on its inexorable march toward independence, rather than a geopolitical move to counter Milosevic and stabilize the Balkans.

And if the Albanians were grateful at first when the U.N. arrived, now they seem to view UNMIK as a benign occupying force that will protect them while they recover their strength, set them on the path toward independence and then get the hell out. An example: UNMIK has attempted to convert the members of the KLA into a sort of National Guard-like group called the Kosovo Protection Corps, or KPC. The members of the KPC are supposed to disarm and engage in public works projects, but no one really believes that they are changing their stripes. The Albanian acronym for KPC is TMK, which, everyone jokes, stands for “Tomorrow’s Masters of Kosovo.”

One morning as I walked along one of Pristina’s dirty, muddy streets, a little girl sitting on a stoop smiled at me and said hello in English. I was so surprised I almost forgot to answer her — she was the only local during my visit who had given any sign of noticing me. Why should the locals notice me? The Albanians don’t want to integrate with anyone. Even in Bosnia, there was intermarriage among Serbs and Croats and Muslims. Not here. In Kosovo, Serbs and Albanians have always lived and slept apart.

The same tribal instincts apply to visitors. Last summer, several foreigners who made the mistake of dancing with some Albanian women at a local club were so viciously beaten they had to be evacuated by helicopter. Sooner or later, the Albanians know, I will be gone, as eventually, they think, all the other foreigners will too — including, especially, the Serbs.

The U.N. has an immense task in Kosovo. It must help create all the structures, from the noble to the mundane, that define a country — a government, a legal system, an economy, an infrastructure, law enforcement, postal and telephone service, garbage collection. But it must do that without furthering the Albanians’ faith that Kosovo will become a separate country.

That’s a fine line to walk, and despite the efforts of UNMIK’s many smart and dedicated people, working seven days a week and living in hardship, it may be an impossible mission.

The logistical aspects alone are daunting enough. Consider the economy. For the past 20 years Kosovars survived on a wildly inefficient socialist economy and money sent from relatives working abroad. Kosovo doesn’t have welfare mothers; it has welfare everyone.

“The attitude of many people here is that Yugoslavia circa 1985 was excellent,” one U.N. official told me. Of the 300 companies that existed in Kosovo before the war, perhaps a couple of dozen are still viable, but they will need to make sizable layoffs. There is some farming and some timber, although reforestation is a foreign concept. If meaningful trade is even possible for a tiny region without any distinctive natural assets, it will be years, if not decades, away. So UNMIK has tried to implement the collection of revenue through things like an airport tax, the licensing of gas stations and auto registration.

But at the moment, Kosovo lives off international aid and the service economy generated by foreigners. Neither will last indefinitely. One of the 29 political parties campaigning in the upcoming municipal elections is actually promoting tourism as a source of income. I can’t think of a single reason why a tourist would want to visit Kosovo.

Organized crime thrived in Kosovo before the bombing, and its grip has probably tightened since. It’s said that, for 1,000 marks (UNMIK imposed the deutsche mark as Kosovo’s currency), or about $430, you can buy a Mercedes, a BMW, any car you want, as long as you don’t mind that it belongs to someone else.

Pristina is also full of illegal construction. Built without safety regulations or building codes on land that the builders usually don’t even own, such structures are ubiquitous — a seven-story building across the street from UNMIK headquarters, a hotel going up in a public park.

UNMIK tries to identify the illegal buildings and condemn them for destruction, but it isn’t easy. A few weeks ago, the U.N. appointed an Albanian to head the process. He condemned three buildings before being gunned down, gangland style. For Kosovo’s criminals, killing an Albanian is simpler than killing a foreigner, and UNMIK’s decision to put a local in such a visible, vulnerable position was a stinging mistake.

UNMIK’s challenge of rebuilding Kosovo is also complicated by the separation of public institutions that the hatred here renders necessary. Hospitals are segregated because a Serb in an Albanian hospital would not fare well. So are schools. “I do not think,” one U.N. official said, “that a Serbian child in a mixed classroom could survive more than a couple of hours.”

Kosovo, you might say, is making the U.N. schizophrenic. An organization devoted to bringing the peoples of the world together has conceded that, in Kosovo, peace requires separatism.

I asked one U.N. official how the Serbian enclaves could possibly become self-sustaining. They can’t, he said. So KFOR will guard them indefinitely? I asked. Not indefinitely, he said. For 10, maybe 20 years. The solution lies in “generational attrition.” Most young Serbs have left Kosovo; those remaining tend to be middle-aged and older. “I can’t see that we can sustain these people in any real way,” he admitted. “But in 20 years, the problem will probably be solved.”

Such words are chilling, but they’re also realistic. Because no matter how much some things change in Kosovo, others stay the same, just as they have for hundreds of years. The blackbirds still fly at dusk, tens of thousands of them swooping and whirling as they fill the sky with black clouds. And when night falls, wild dogs roam the streets.