Because I loved adult fiction as a child, when my daughter Holly developed a fondness for R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books at the age of eleven or twelve, I dashed down to my library and returned with a paperback copy of Stephen King’s Carrie. “If you like those, you’ll love this,” I told her. Holly spent the rest of her early teen years reading books in which cheerful young heroines traveled in covered wagons across the plains, and in which nothing conceivably nasty ever happened to anyone. And, even fifteen years later, sometimes, when Stephen King comes up in conversation, she glares at me.
