It’s a big flea market; sometimes we come to sell and sometimes to buy. When you first came here you felt fresh and new, everybody around you was vibrant, full of attention, you couldn’t imagine ever getting used to this place. It felt so foreign and inscrutable. You so much wanted to be part of it, to conquer it, survive it, put your flag up, and you longed for that feeling of estrangement to vanish. You wished you could press a button and feel like you had been here all your life, knew all the roads, the shops, the mechanics, the tricks, the names of each animal and indigenous tree. You hated the idea of being foreign, wanted to blend in like a chameleon, join the group and be accepted for good. Didn’t want to be investigated. Your past had no meaning; you only cared about the future.

Obviously, you were mad to think you could get away with it without paying a price.

She is on the early-morning British Airways flight.

Her name is Claire, I have never seen her. I was told that she is blond, long-legged and sexy. She will be looking for me. She has probably been told to watch out for a dark-haired chain smoker with the look of a psychopath, or at least this is the only honest description that would fit me today.

I hate Claire, she is my enemy, even though we have never met. Yet I am here to greet her and welcome her as part of our family, the baboon group whose behaviour I have finally managed to make my own. I guess this is my punishment.

She has never lived here before, but she is coming to stay for good. She will eventually learn all the rules and turn into another specimen, like all of us. That is what everyone has to learn in order to survive here. She is coming to live with the man I am in love with, a man I haven’t been able to hold on to. Another possession which slipped out of my hands to be snatched up by the next buyer.

The tourists start pouring through the gate, pushing squeaking carts loaded with Samsonite suitcases. They all wear funny clothes, as if each one of them had put on some kind of costume to match the ideal self they have chosen to be on this African holiday. The Adventurer, the White Hunter, the Romantic Colonialist, the Surfer. They are all taking a break from themselves.

She comes towards me looking slightly lost. I notice her long thin legs, her blond hair pulled tightly into a braid. Her skin is pale, still made up with London fog. She is wearing a flowery dress and a thick blue woolen sweater that makes her look slightly childlike. I wave my hand and she lights up. It’s true: she is beautiful. She has destroyed my life.

It’s like musical chairs, this secondhand game. When the music stops, one of us gets stuck with their bum up in the air. This time it must have been my turn.

“Did you have a good flight?” I try a motherly tone.

“Oh God, yes. I slept like a log. I feel great.” She smells the air. “Thank you so much for coming to pick me up at this hour. I told Hunter that I could have easily gotten a taxi –”

“Don’t even say that. There’s nothing worse than arriving in a place for the first time and having to start haggling for a cab. I believe in picking up people at airports. It’s just one of those rules.”

“Well, thanks.” She smiles a friendly smile. “Wow, you drive this car?”

“Sure.” I hop in and open the passenger seat while I hand a ten-shilling note to the porter. “Watch out, it’s full of junk. Just throw everything on the back seat.”

Claire looks slightly intimidated by the mess in the car. Tusker beer empties on the floor, muddy boots, a panga on the dashboard, mosquito nets, dirty socks, rusty spanners.

“I just came back from safari,” I say matter-of-factly as I pull out on the main road.

“Oh.”

She looks out the window at the grey sky hanging low over the acacias. Her first impression of Africa.

“What a nice smell. So fragrant.”

She sits quietly for a few seconds, letting it all sink in, her weariness mixing with her expectations. Her new life is about to begin. I feel a pang in my stomach. I didn’t think it would be this hard. As usual, I overestimated my strength.

“Have you heard from Hunter? He’s still in Uganda, right?” I ask, knowing perfectly well where he is; I have memorized the hotel phone number.

“Yeah. He thinks he’ll be back next week, unless there are problems at the border with the Sudanese troops. In which case he will have to go in.”

She sounds so casual, the way she has picked up that hack slang, as if the outbreak of a war was the equivalent of a night club opening. Just something else to report, another two thousand words in print.

“Let’s hope not.” I add more of the motherly tone. “I’m sure you don’t want to be left here alone for too long.”

“I’ll be all right. It’s all so new, I’m sure I won’t be bored.” She turns to me and I feel her eyes scanning me. “I knew when he asked me to come here that he wouldn’t be around a lot of the time,” she adds nonchalantly.

She’s tough, I can tell already, hard inside, under the fair skin and that blondness. She’ll get what she wants.

“You live with Adam right?” — to put me back in my place.

“Yes. He’s still at the camp up north with the clients. I’ve just come back from there. You’ll meet him when he comes down on Saturday.”

“I’ve heard so much about him from Hunter. He sounds wonderful.”

“He is wonderful.”

We take the Langata road towards Karen. She looks out the window taking everything in: the tall grass shining under the morning sunlight that has pierced the clouds, the old diesel truck loaded with African workers which spits a cloud of black smoke in our face, the huge potholes. She will learn how to drive a big car, find her way around town, she will learn the names of the trees and the animals.

“I’ll drop you at home, show you how to turn on the hot water and things like that, and then leave you to rest. If you need anything just call me, I live right around the corner from you.”

“Thank you, Esme, you are being so kind.”

She will fall asleep in the bed I know so well which is now hers.

I am glad to hate her. Now I will go home and probably cry.

This is a country of space, and yet we all live in a tiny microcosm to protect ourselves from it. We venture out there, and like to feel that we could easily get lost and never be found again. But we always come back to the reassuring warmth of our white man’s neighbourhood in modern Africa. It’s right outside Nairobi, at the foot of the Ngong hills where Karen Blixen’s farm was. It’s called Langata, which in Masai means “the place where the cattle drink.”

There’s no escape; here you know what everybody is doing. You either see their car driving around, or hidden under the trees in their lover’s back yard, parked outside the bank, the grocery shop, filling up at the gas station. A lot of honking and waving goes on on the road. You bump into each other at the supermarket while you are shopping, the post office while paying your bills, at the hospital while waiting to be treated for malaria by the same sexy Italian doctor, at the airport where you are going to pick up a friend, at the car repair shop.

Even when you are out on safari, thousands of miles away from everybody, if you see a canvas green Landcruiser coming the other way, you look, assuming you’ll know the driver, and most times you do. It’s a comforting obsession. So much space around you and yet only that one small herd of baboons roaming around it.

This is our giant playground, the only place left on the planet where you can still play like children pretending to be adults.

Even though we pretend we have left them behind, we have very strict rules here. We sniff new entries suspiciously, evaluating the consequences that their arrival may bring into the group. Fear of possible unbalance, excitement about potential mating, according to the gender. Always a silent stir. In turn each one of us becomes the outcast and new alliances are struck. Everyone lies. There’s always a secret deal that has been struck prior to the one you are secretly striking now. Women will team up together against a new female specimen if she’s a threat to the family, but won’t hesitate to declare war against each other if boundaries are crossed. It’s all about territory and conquest, an endless competition to cover ground and gain control.

You always considered yourself better than the others, in a sense less corrupted by the African behaviour. You thought of yourself as a perfectly civilized, well-read, compassionate human being, always conscious of social rules. The discovery that you too have become such an animal infuriates you. At first you are humiliated by your own ruthlessness, then you become almost fascinated by it. The raw honesty of that basic crudeness makes you feel stronger in a way. You realize that there is no room, no time for moral indignation.

That this is simply about survival.

Nicole and I are having lunch in a joint off River Road, where you can get Gujarati vegetarian meals. You have to eat off your aluminum plate with your fingers. There is a lot of bright coloured plastic panelling, fans, flies, and a decor straight out of some demented David Lynch set. Wazungus, white people, never dream of coming here and that is exactly why we do, because we like the idea of two white girls having a lunch date on the wrong side of town.

“You look sick,” Nicole says, gulping down chapati and dal. Her skin is a shade too pale for someone living in Africa and covered in a thin film of sweat. She’s angular, beautiful in an offbeat way.

“I am sick.”

“You have to get over it. I can’t stand to see you like this.”

She has just had a manicure at the Norfolk Hotel beauty salon and her nails are painted a deep blood red. She’s wearing the same colour lipstick which is rapidly fading onto the paper napkin and the chapati, a skimpy skirt and a gauze shirt. Looks like she has just walked out of an interview for an acting job at the Polo Lounge in Hollywood and driven all the way to the equator in a convertible sports car.

“You didn’t have to go pick her up at the airport. I mean, someone else could have.”

“I guess I wanted to test myself. And in a way it was symbolic.”

“Did Hunter ask you to do it?”

“Yes.” I nod quickly. But it’s a lie.

“I can’t believe it. He’s such a–”

“No. Actually it was my idea.”

“You are sick.”

“True. But it’s all part of our private little war.”

Nicole sighs and takes another mouthful of vegetable curry, her wavy hair hanging over the food.

“What does she do? I mean what is she planning to do here?”

“I haven’t a clue. Articles for House and Garden? Maybe she will start a workshop with Kikuyu women and have them weave baskets for Pier One. She looks like she could be the crafty type …”

“Oh please.” Nicole laughs and lights a cigarette, waving her lacquered nails in the air. “She must be better than that.”

I take a deep breath, fighting the wave of anxiety which is about to choke me. I am actually drugged by the raw pain. It is almost a pleasure to feel it inside me, like a mean wind on a sail that any minute could wreck me. If I survive it it will eventually push me to the other shore. If there is another shore.

I feel as if I have lost everything. It isn’t just Hunter. I have also lost Adam, myself, and most of all I have shattered the silly dream I had about my life here: I have lost Africa.

“When I saw her this morning” — I have to say this, to get it out of my system — “the way she was looking at things, so full of excitement … you know, everything must have seemed so new and different … it reminded me of myself when I first came down here. Of the strength I had then. I felt like Napoleon on a new campaign, I wanted to move my armies here, you know what I mean?”

She nods; she’s heard this a million times, but has decided to be patient because I guess she loves me. She knew beforehand that this lunch would require an extra dose of tolerance.

“She’ll fight her battle, and learn the pleasure of annexing new territories. And I don’t mean just sexually. She will start to feel incredibly free. Whereas I am already a prisoner here. Like you and all the others. We fought, we thought we had won something, but in the end we are all stuck here like prisoners of war. And we still can’t figure out who the enemy was.”

“Oh please, don’t be so apocalyptic. You are just in a seriously bad mood. I think you need a break. Maybe you should go back to Europe for a while.”

“Nicole, why is it that after so many years we don’t have any African friends? Can you give me an answer? I mean, if you think about it –”

“What does that have to do with –”

“It does. We’re like ghosts here; we can’t contribute to anything, we don’t really serve any purpose. We don’t believe in this country. We are here only because of its beauty. It’s horrifying. Don’t you think?”

Nicole picks up my dark glasses from the table and tries them on, looking nowhere in particular.

“Look, there’s no use talking about this again. I hate it when everybody gets pessimistic and irrational and starts ranting about living here.”

She stares at me from behind the dark lenses, then takes them off and wipes them with a paper napkin.

“Haven’t you noticed the pattern? We’re like this bunch of manic-depressives. One moment we think we live in Paradise, next thing this place has turned into a giant trap we’re desperate to get out of.”

“Yes,” I say, “it’s like a roller-coaster.”

“I think what we all do is project our anxieties onto the whole fucking continent. This has always been Hunter’s major feature and you’ve just spent too much time listening to him. He loves to ruin it for everyone else because he hates the idea of being alone in his unhappiness. He will ruin it for Claire as well, just wait, you’ll see.”

This thought makes me feel slightly better. I am not in a position to rejoice at anybody’s future happiness at the moment, I feel far too ungenerous. I am acting just like Hunter: working to create as much misery around me so that I don’t feel completely left out.

Nicole smiles.

“Come to the loo. Then I’ll take you to Biashara street. You need a bit of shopping therapy.”

Nicole is cutting a line of coke on her compact mirror inside the pink Gujarati washroom. I envy the way she always seems to be completely unaffected by her surroundings and carries on living in the third world as if she’s simply browsing through an ethnic sale at Harrod’s.

She snorts quickly, holding back her curls.

“Wow! It’s such bad stuff, but what the hell …”

She watches me while I inhale my portion of rat poison, then puts on a naughty smile.

“We’ll turn Claire onto this really bad coke and transform her into an addict, that’s how we’re going to get rid of her. We’ll persecute her till she gets a bleeding nose.”

I finally laugh. The rush makes me feel warmer. I’d like to hug Nicole now, but she is suddenly looking serious.

“You know, Esme, I never told you, but in a way I feel like I should tell you now …”

“What?”

“I did sleep with Hunter as well. Long before you came out here.”

“Oh.”

Her cheeks are lightly flushed. I drop my eyes from her face.

“I had a feeling you had,” I say. But the revelation hasn’t shocked or hurt me.

“Why?”

“Just because … oh I don’t know. Because of a certain intimacy you two always had.”

“Do you mind me telling you only now?”

“No. It doesn’t make any difference. Really.”

We pause and smile at each other. I feel my heart hammering wildly, and the sudden urge for a cigarette. But I know it must be the cocaine, not her revelation. Strangely, if anything it makes me feel closer to her. She lights two cigarettes and hands me mine. We stand, our backs against the pink tiles, inhaling smoke and scouring powder.

“I am not unaware of what you said before, you know. We are all trapped in some kind of crazy white-people’s game here,” she says in a soft voice. “I just don’t want to get completely engulfed in that kind of dissatisfaction because I don’t have any alternatives.”

“What do you mean?”

“I wouldn’t be able to go back to Europe and function at this point. That’s what made me so unhappy about sleeping with Hunter, now that I think of it. I felt he was constantly drawing energy out of me. His bitterness was poisoning me; that’s what made me get away from him.”

“Hmmm … I guess I am the one who has been poisoned now.”

We stand in silence, smoking our cigarettes.

“I’ll tell you exactly what it is that hurts, Nicole. The absolute certainty that I don’t, and probably you don’t either, have the determination, no, wait — the faith — to redeem someone like Hunter. We both would rather be poisoned than try to detox him. I never believed I had the power to make him happy. Isn’t that stupid?”

“Why, what makes you think this girl will?”

“She has that strength. She will simply drive him out of whatever hole he’s trapped in and bring him to the surface. She will love him, it’s as simple as that.”

“You love him too.”

“But she’s fearless. Young. And she will have his children.”

“Yes. She’s a breeder …”

“Right. We are not.”

“No. We’d rather snort coke in the loo.”

We pause, meditate for a few seconds. Then we do another line and go shopping.

I have to go one step back and try to put things in order. To fabricate some excuses for myself.

You have tried to leave before.

You have woken up in your bed in the middle of the winter, rain furiously pounding on the mabati roof, and felt like everything including your brain was turning to mould. You hate the idea of being so far away, forgotten by your friends at home, oblivious to the political changes in the world. You are starved for magazines, sophisticated conversation, films and good clothes. The person lying next to you is a man who was born here, for whom all that is simply nonexistent. Before falling asleep he has told you how much he loves the sound of the rain pounding on the tin roof at night, how it reminds him of his childhood. You hear him breathing peacefully, wrapped up in the blanket while you are going mad. In the morning you walk out in the garden, holding your hot mug of coffee close to your chin, your last good pair of boots deep in the thick mud. You feel as if your entire soul is going under. Everything around you has the bitter taste of decay: the mangoes rotting in the basket, the corrupted policeman at the roadblock who wants a bribe to let you pass, the headlines in the paper about new tribal massacres in the desert and piles of bodies liquefying in the heat. Suddenly the hardness of Africa reveals itself to you. Senseless and without redemption.

When you look in the mirror your face looks drained, armored, no trace of lightness left. You look older. That’s when you think there may still be time to save yourself.

You want to leave. And you believe you will never come back.

Nobody is happy to let you escape, since everyone shares the symptoms of your disease. Someone will take you malcontentedly to the airport, in full Kenyan style, still wearing shorts and sandals, opening one Tusker beer after another, hitting the cap on the door handle and throwing the dripping empties on the back seat. They will sway and swear overtaking matatu buses on the way, they will be rude with the porters who are too slow to take your luggage.

You don’t care.

You are already on the other side of the ocean, shielded by what’s left of your good European clothes, the list of phone calls you have to make tomorrow.

You are out of here.

You check in with a smile, handing your ticket to the pretty stewardess in flawless uniform, the efficiency of Europe already welcoming you behind the airline counter.

You think you will come back, sure, but just as a tourist, to see your friends and your ex-lovers. To see all the places you loved. The Chyulu hills, Lake Turkana, the beach of Lamu, the Ewaso Nyiro River.

You don’t know yet that you won’t be able to get away.

So many people have tried to define the feeling the French call mal d’afrique which in fact is a disease. The English never had a definition for it, I guess because they never liked to admit that they were being threatened in any way by this continent. Obviously because they preferred the idea of ruling it rather than being ruled by it.

Only now I realize how that feeling is a form of corruption. It’s like a crack in the wood which slowly creeps its way in. It gradually gets deeper and deeper until it has finally split you from the rest. You wake up one day to discover that you are floating on your own, you have become an independent island detached from its motherland, from its moral home base. Everything has already happened while you were asleep and now it’s too late to attempt anything: you are out here, there’s no way back. This is a one-way trip.

Against your will you are forced to experience the euphoric horror of floating in emptiness, your moorings cut for good. It is an emotion which has slowly corroded all your ties, but it is also a constant vertigo you will never get used to.

This is why one day you have to come back. Because now you no longer belong anywhere. Not to any address, house, or telephone number in any city. Because once you have been out here, hanging loose in the Big Nothing, you will never be able to fill your lungs with enough air.

Africa has taken you in and has broken you away from what you were before.

This is why you will keep wanting to get away but will always have to return.

Then, of course, there is the sky.

There is no sky as big as this one anywhere else in the world. It hangs over you, like some kind of gigantic umbrella, and takes your breath away. You are flattened between the immensity of the air above you and the solid ground. It’s all around you, 360 degrees: sky and earth, one the aerial reflection of the other. The horizon here is no longer a flat line, but an endless circle which makes your head spin. I’ve tried to figure out the trick that lies behind this mystery, because I don’t see any reason why there should be more sky in one place than in another. Yet I haven’t been able to discover what is the optical illusion that makes the African sky so different from any other sky you have seen in your life. It could be the particular angle of the planet at the equator, or maybe the way clouds float, not above your head, but straight in front of your nose, sitting on the lower border of the umbrella, just on top of the horizon. Those drifting clouds which constantly redesign the map: in one glance you can see a rainstorm building up north, the sun shining in the east, and grey sky in the west which is bound to turn blue any minute. It’s like sitting in front of a giant TV screen looking at a cosmic weather report.

You are travelling north, towards the NFD, the legendary North Frontier District, and suddenly it’s as if you were looking at the landscape through the wrong side of binoculars. The ultimate wide-angle lens, which compresses the infinite within your field of vision. Your eyes have never cast a glance so far.

Flat land that runs all the way to the distant purple profile of the Matthews Range and then, just when you thought you had reached an end to the space, right when you imagined that the landscape would close itself around you again, that you would feel less exposed, another curtain lifts up to reveal more vastness, and your eyes still can’t catch the end of it.

More land stretching obediently under your tires, offering itself to be crossed. Your tracks become the endless flag of your conquest. You fill your lungs with the dry smell of hot rocks and dust, and you feel like you are breathing the universe.

You see yourself as you are driving into this grandiose absolute geometry: you are just a tiny dot, a minuscule particle advancing very slowly. You have now drowned in space, you are forced to redefine all proportions. You think of a word that hasn’t occurred to you in years. It sprouts from somewhere inside you.

You feel humble. Because Africa is the beginning.

There is no shelter here: no shade, no walls, no roofs to hide under. Man has never cared to leave his mark on the land. Just tiny huts made of straw, like birds’ nests that the wind will easily blow away.

You can’t hide.

Here you are, under that burning sun, exposed. You realize that all you can rely on now is your body. Nothing you have learned in school, from television, from your clever friends, from the books you have read, will help you here.

Only now do you become aware that your legs are not strong enough to run, your nostrils can’t smell, your eyesight is too weak. You realize you have lost all your original powers. When the wind blows the acrid smell of the buffalo in your nose, a smell you had never smelled before, you recognize it instantly. You know that its smell has always been here. Yours on the other hand is the result of many different things, from sunblock to toothpaste.

Le mal d’afrique is vertigo, is corrosion, and at the same time is nostalgia. It’s a longing to go back to your childhood, to the same innocence and the same horror, when everything was still possible and every day could have been the day you die.

As I said, I am making excuses for myself.

I am trying to put everything on a grander scale, in order to feel that I haven’t lost all I have lost for nothing. I have been driven out of the Garden of Eden but the apple wasn’t something I wanted to eat out of simple greediness. Now I know that no human being will ever resist that temptation.

Come on, you know it’s true. If you want to say that King is not as good a writer as all sorts of people who sell fewer books and end up on more course syllabuses, I won’t argue. I will, however, point out that such judgments depend on your idea of what “good” literature is, and what it’s good for. And that no one I know has ever stayed up until 4 a.m., knuckles white and breath coming in shallow gulps, because they had to finish “Gravity’s Rainbow.”

King’s great talent is to keep you reading. His books will suck you out of your regular life and dangle you over the darkest unexplored abysses of your mind, while your flesh crawls around your skeleton as if trying to escape; they’re nobody’s idea of glittering literary style. I’ve been a fan since I read “The Shining” as a teenager, and yet there are things in every one of his books that make me wince. His sense of humor is crude at best and frequently runs to juvenile scatology. His minor characters are often clumsily rendered “colorful” types who speak in a mixture of hackneyed folk witticisms and implausibly detailed expository passages (when crucial plot points are to be divulged). And as nobly and mightily as King has wrestled with his greatest weakness — his difficulty in creating convincing female characters — he has never, to my taste, quite conquered it. (Though the predominantly female book-buying public, it should be noted, hasn’t seemed to mind.)

Comparing King to, say, Henry James is a bit like comparing a potato to a chrysanthemum. One of them is undeniably more beautiful, but which one do you want by the fire on a cold winter night? As King would be eager to point out, there is a kinship of sorts between James and himself — they inhabit different wings in the great, rambling mansion of the Gothic tradition. But King’s real literary grandfather is not Henry James but Charles Dickens, another shameless yarn spinner who captured the middlebrow popular imagination, who shares King’s sentimentality, didacticism and love of the grotesque, and against whom all the criticisms of the previous paragraph (save perhaps the scatology) could be leveled.

It’s impossible to know whether King’s work will ever acquire the aura of respectability that Dickens’ has. While Dickens was probably just as big a celebrity, in 19th century terms, as King is today, he was never stigmatized as a back-of-the-store genre novelist in quite the same way (nor was the disjunction between popular and elite taste quite so exaggerated). One thing we can be sure of is that the enormous audience for horror literature that King has helped to create and solidify ensures that his books will be read for a long time to come. He has taken the moldering tradition of supernatural literature — the tradition of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft — and brought it into the late 20th century as a vibrant, polemic social chronicle. Playing shamelessly on our fear of death, and on our half-delighted suspicion that all the rational Enlightenment thinking of the last 300 years has utterly failed to comprehend the true chaos and disorder of the universe, King argues, perversely enough, for a politics of love.

Although the monsters, ghosts and madnesses that lurk beneath the bucolic landscape of King’s territory in central and western Maine — an imaginative terrain as vivid to his readers as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or William Kennedy’s Albany are to theirs — may be diabolical or extraterrestrial in origin, King’s central themes are strikingly contemporary, and all too human. His greatest concern, stated in its most positive light, is with the survival, vindication and ultimate triumph of the weak and vulnerable. The tangible results of the evil in King’s universe include bullying, racism, wife-beating, rape and, above all else, the abuse and murder of children. Few authors in any genre have ever captured the unique fragility and terror of childhood with such precision, and King’s instinctive sympathy for the plight of the nerd, the fat kid, the scapegoat, the queer, is a great source of his appeal.

But King is after all a horror novelist, and thus there is a darker side to his obsession with childhood. Again and again he suggests that every adult — or, to be specific, every man — is a potential vector for evil, that with the wrong stars overhead and the wrong demons clawing at his ankles, he will channel a primordial bloodlust and become a wife-killer, a child-killer, a monster. Whatever this may or may not say about the psychology of Stephen King (who has been married to the same woman for 27 years and has three grown children), the truly frightening thing is just how difficult — on the evidence of the society around us — this proposition is to disprove.

Selecting five of King’s 32 novels (including the ones he has written as Richard Bachman) to serve as an introductory reading list is a necessarily arbitrary exercise. I have chosen books that I think illustrate his central themes most clearly, books I think are his most terrifying and two books (“Carrie” and “The Green Mile”) that even those readers who can’t abide the roller-coaster torment of the horror novel should be able to appreciate. King fans may be outraged by my omission of “The Stand,” the immense apocalyptic saga that may be his most popular book. All I can say is that new readers have a right to know what they’re in for before undertaking that journey (which has inflated to more than 1,100 pages in King’s 1990 revised edition). I have also steered clear of King’s obsessive meditations on the relationship of the popular novelist to his public (although both “Misery” and “The Dark Half” are excellent thrillers), and his earnest fables of abused women questing for redemption (“Gerald’s Game,” “Dolores Claiborne” and “Rose Madder”). As the master himself would say in one of his self-consciously Dickensian prologues: Constant Reader, I beg your forgiveness. Now come with me into the dark.

Carrie (1974)
“Carrie” is a crucial hors d’oeuvre to King’s body of work. It was his first successful novel, and it stands apart from the others in several ways, especially its relative brevity, its intensely negative depiction of religious faith — which otherwise does not play a major role in King’s universe — and its highly compelling portrayal of a female central character. (King has said that his wife, writer Tabitha King, played a significant role in Carrie’s creation.) Yet this tale of a gawky high-school pariah — she uses her
telekinetic abilities to destroy not only her teenage tormentors but an entire
New England town — is also one of the clearest statements of King’s conception that those who are abused can often transmute their victimization into an awful and unpredictable power.

Along with William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist” and Thomas Tryon’s “The Other,” “Carrie” greatly expanded the market — and the sense of narrative possibilities — for horror literature in the 1970s. Ironically, of the three books, “Carrie,” although by turns pathetic, gruesome and tragic, is perhaps the least suspenseful. King reveals what Carrie has done almost immediately, then builds toward a description of the climactic events with an air of almost Athenian gravity and inevitability. Hence, while the book remains compulsively readable and features ample mayhem and destruction, one remembers it not as a gore-drenched nightmare but as a heartbreakingly tender portrait of a girl who really just wanted to go to the prom, get kissed by a cute boy and be home by midnight.

The Shining (1977)
Although it has been somewhat overshadowed by Stanley Kubrick’s undeniably powerful (if incoherent) film version, “The Shining” remains, for me, King’s most haunting and memorable achievement. In the Overlook Hotel, the sprawling, empty Colorado resort where young Danny Torrance and his parents must spend the winter entirely alone, King has created one of the Gothic tradition’s truly unforgettable settings. Danny, who has a psychic sensibility one observer dubs “the shining,” rapidly becomes aware that the Overlook is a veritable hive of malevolent energy, and that many of its previous occupants have ended their stays unpleasantly. The Torrance family’s weak spot is, of course, Danny’s father Jack, a recovering alcoholic and struggling writer who hopes to use his stint as the Overlook’s caretaker to finish a novel. Jack’s losing battle against the Overlook’s destructive forces, whatever they are — demons? Vengeful Native American spirits? Plain old mental illness? — is a chilling depiction of the descent into bestial male madness, and taught King readers a cruel lesson we would never forget: You can’t ever really trust Dad.

“The Shining” sustains an almost unbearable level of narrative tension as Danny and his mother come to grips with the fact that Jack has made new friends (even though there’s no one else in the hotel), and that his novel has taken a disturbing turn. Like all King’s best works, this is a supernatural novel and a deeply realistic one, a masterful evocation of a diabolical genius loci and a grim meditation on the weakness and vulnerability of the human imagination.

Pet Sematary (1983)
I don’t know what visions or nightmares inspired this book, and I don’t want to know. Consider yourself warned — “Pet Sematary,” I think, is King’s darkest hour, and even inveterate horror consumers will lose a night or two of sleep with it. Once you recover from this mind-bending yarn about a sinister Indian burial ground with the power to return animals — and ultimately humans — from the dead, you may notice that once again King has crafted an insidious fable about how a dark secret, a family-destroying evil, can be passed along across the generations.

Another of King’s tricks — and I’m not sure this one is conscious — is to make his central characters so irritatingly square that you almost feel they deserve whatever horrors they stumble into. (Then, when they suffer the torments of Job, you have a reason to feel guilty as well as horrified.) But as dippy as Dr. Louis Creed and his wife, Rachel, are, nobody deserves what happens to them. Lured by a “friendly” older neighbor in their rural Maine town into burying his daughter’s truck-squashed cat on sacred Micmac ground behind the pet cemetery, Louis finds himself seduced by the intoxicating power of the place. It’s bad enough that the cat who returns the next day is a bit different from its original incarnation; the Creeds’ 2-year-old son then wanders in front of a passing truck, and Louis finds his grief intolerable. If you can stand it (and many readers can’t), “Pet Sematary” brings one of the hoariest of metaphysical morality lessons — that those who try to cheat or deny death will suffer horrible consequences — into a contemporary context, to shattering effect.

It (1986)
A sweeping, multi-character drama of childhood trauma and adult transcendence, “It” contains all of King’s major themes and concerns — along with one of his most horrific portrayals of evil — in one hefty volume. The eponymous It is a demon, or alien entity, or perhaps psychological manifestation (King’s spooks can almost always be understood allegorically) that inhabits the sewer system of Derry, Maine, reappearing every 27 years to claim a succession of child victims. In 1958, a collection of preadolescent Derry outcasts, banding together as the Losers’ Club, courageously ventured into the sewers to defeat It, vowing that they would return if the monster ever resurfaced. Now, in 1985, the former Losers are scattered around the globe — most of them having repressed the memory of their childhood horror and forgotten their promise — and the one who remains in Derry must call the others to tell them that a new series of grisly child-killings has begun.

Even more than most of King’s novels, “It” reflects the tenor of its time. Child abuse, and the controversial idea that it could be forgotten or repressed for years, were fresh and painful subjects in the mid-1980s. The monster in “It” appears to children as a seductive, sadistic clown, clearly echoing real-world serial killer John Wayne Gacy. But despite its serious undertones, “It,” with its large cast and impressively messy flashback/flash-forward structure, is primarily a great adventure novel and a testament to the fact that adults who retain some connection to their childhood idealism are the only ones who really grow up.

The Green Mile (1996)
Perhaps sensing that some of the fun had drained out of his work during his dutiful, pro-feminist experimentation of the early ’90s, King published this death-row thriller in monthly paperback installments from March to August 1996. The result is an artless, old-fashioned storytelling style that’s deeply gratifying, yielding a gripping prison yarn whose grisly and supernatural elements never overwhelm its basic humanity. “The Green Mile” is narrated by a retired prison guard named Paul Edgecombe, now confined to a nursing home, who has decided that before he dies he must recount the extraordinary events he witnessed along the green-tiled corridor of a Southern death row in 1932. That was the year an incompetent and sadistic guard named Percy, a homicidal maniac named Billy the Kid, a preternaturally intelligent mouse and a gentle giant (convicted of a terrible killing) who seems to have healing powers came together just yards from the electric chair.

There’s no question that King hopes to shock readers (pun intended) into opposing capital punishment, and his almost biblical conviction that the trials of the abused will ultimately make them stronger than their abusers is once again very much in evidence. But King himself would tell you that good pulp is almost always moralistic, and “The Green Mile” unashamedly tries to create a ’90s adult version of the Weird Tales comic books King grew up on, thrill rides whose every cliffhanging installment left readers agonizingly longing for the next. Check out the first volume from the library tonight, and, an hour or so later, you’ll be checking your watch to see if you might just make it back to the branch before it closes.

You may not have ever harbored the urge to write the great American novel, but you still should know that a little imaginative zeal goes a long way in creating that artifact of personal history. Whether you’re applying to sling cappuccinos at the local cafe, tutor stuporous teens in the dark art of the SATs or spearhead a high-tech Web site, your fictional talents can help pave the way to a quicker, more painless paycheck.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that you lie. Or even stretch the truth to distortion. Fibbing and fabrication are for fools, as an increasing number of Boston Globe columnists will tell you. I am suggesting that, like any writer, you harness your creative powers to tell the most compelling story you can muster. A résumé, to be frank, is a pathetic little narrative form, but you’ve got to grab your readers and hold them as long as it takes to wedge your foot in the door.

After years of obsessive résumé writing and editing on behalf of hundreds of career counseling clients, I realized that aside from the basic no-no’s (bad grammar, typographical inconsistencies and wooden-sounding objectives), the single most common problem in most résumés is that of omission. Young people are especially inclined to leave out the juicy details, the volunteer jobs, the one-person businesses, artistic creations and diverse hobbies that round out a résumé from a boring list into an irresistible three-dimensional human being.

Here are some fiction writing rules you can apply to the reviled art of résumé writing.

1. Understand your form

Most résumés follow a pretty standard order, which you can choose to change if you want to emphasize one of your strengths.

• Name, address and phone number/e-mail at the top of the page and in a larger and/or bolder font.

• Objective: A standard sentence fragment stating your career objectives. If it’s not for a corporate job, however, I recommend you eliminate this altogether.

• Education: Beginning with the present, work back in time, stating your post-high school degrees and experiences. List your college, major or area of expertise, and any graduating honors. Some people list their grade-point average. But in this day of grade inflation, it’s pretty damn meaningless and makes you seem like someone too eager to accept a numerical estimation of your worth. I’d skip it.

• Experience: Begin with the present and move back in time listing all the jobs, volunteer positions and other relevant experiences that bear upon the job you’re looking for. If you have a lot of job-related experience and are not as proud of your school performance, you may want to put your educational information after your experience. Note: This will be the section that you’ll probably change to tailor your résumé to each job you apply for. (This isn’t cheating, it’s completely standard practice!)

• You may also want to add a section called Honors, Prizes and Scholarships or Publications. This gives you a chance to fit in other goodies that won’t fit into Education or Experience.

• Finally, Interests or Activities can allow you to give them some sense of your personality beyond the glow of the office. And under Skills you can be specific about your technical skills, fluency with languages, etc.

2. Write what you know

Make a list of relevant memories and see if any of them can be fashioned into a “volunteer job.” Consistently, young college grads underestimate the importance of their “nonprofessional” experience, when they’ve had their most interesting and challenging experiences outside ordinary jobs, or even accredited classrooms. Think hard about situations when you’ve worked to create or organize something among friends, neighbors or family. It doesn’t need to be a formal volunteer job or internship to show off your skills. Plumb the depths of your memories and bring every relevant piece of information to the fore, then sort them out and fit them into one of your main categories. For instance, when I was 15, I teamed up with two other friends and began catering the parties of family friends. Later, when I applied for restaurant work, I could say I had founded and launched my own catering company.

3. Show, don’t tell

Don’t simply list your jobs. Try to describe the tasks and make each description as precise and elegant as you can manage. At the very least, choose your words with care. Do everything you can, short of being wacky, to catch and carry the eye of your reader. Avoid repeating words unnecessarily. Instead of saying “managed volunteers, managed office and managed inventory,” make sure each of your verbs is different and precise, as in “oversaw volunteers, coordinated office and managed inventory.”

3. Get feedback

Just because one person reads and understands your résumé won’t guarantee that it makes sense to everyone. The more people you can get to comment on and mark up your résumé, the closer you’ll be to communicating exactly what you intend.

4. Writing is rewriting
To misquote Sylvia Plath: Résumé writing is an art/like anything else./I do it so it feels real,/I do it so it feels like hell,/I guess you’d say I’ve a call.

Writing a résumé — especially your first one — can be a painful and frustrating process if you think you can whip one off in an hour or so. A good résumé is the compression of a lot of information and it will take some time to fit together. More time than you’ll probably predict. If you go into it with a sense that this is a process, then the process can be more fun than infuriating. Keep revising it and allowing it to change over the course of several drafts.

5. Get to the good stuff

Always put what’s most interesting and exciting up front, so job searchers can see it when they give your life a once-over. They don’t have time to go searching to discover what a gem you are; you must dazzle them from the start.

6. You are not your work!

That’s how one creative writing teacher used to put it. In the same sense, you are not your résumé. If you are having trouble making your résumé into a document that gets you an interview for a job you are amply qualified for, it doesn’t mean you’re a lousy person or even an unqualified worker. It’s simply a reflection on your résumé, a flimsy piece of paper that can change with every experience you have.