My sister, idly perusing paperbacks in the onboard shop of a BC Ferry, comes across this passage in the Afterword of Stephen King’s You Like it Darker and thinks of her weird brother and his even weirder Goya project:

“As to why so many of my stories are about dark matters, that's another subject. Must I apologize for my material? I think not. Francisco Goya did an etching which showed himself surrounded by fantastical creatures as he dozed and called it The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. I have always thought such sleep, and such monsters, are a necessary component of sanity. (Check out the first line of Shirley Jackson's “The Haunting of Hill House”—she says it well.) Horror stories are best appreciated by those who are compassionate and empathetic.

A paradox, but a true one. I believe it is the unimaginative among us, those incapable of appreciating the dark side of make-believe, who have been responsible for most of the world's woes. In stories of the supernatural and paranormal, I have tried especially hard to show the real world as it is, and to tell the truth about the America I know and love. Some of those truths are ugly, but as the poem says, scars become beauty marks when there is love.”

I’ve never been a King reader. But I have great respect for his craft, having blacked out, on a hot day in August, halfway through his short story, “The Revelations of Becka Paulson” (Rolling Stone, 9 July/2 August 1984, a special summer double issue), about a housewife who accidentally shoots herself in the head, blacks out, and wakes up to find a perfect hole in her forehead, into which she slowly inserts an eyeliner pencil…

This is the passage that made me black out:

Five inches in and the blunt end of the eyebrow pencil had finally encountered resistance. 
It was hard, but a gentle push also communicated a feeling of sponginess. At the same 
moment the whole world turned a brilliant, momentary green and an interlacing of 
memories jigged through her mind - sledding at four in her older brother’s snowsuit, 
washing high school blackboards, a ‘59 Impala her Uncle Bill had owned, the smell of cut 
hay. 

No work of literature has affected me so profoundly physically. Yes, it was freaking hot and I was dehydrated and had been working on a ceiling fresco all day and had drank a couple of beers—and probably smoked a few joints (it was 1984)—but still.

I’ve tried other King books since. None have held me past the first chapter. Any suggestions?