Take Me Out to the Ballgame

Stewart O'Nan and Stephen King will spend the summer watching the Red Sox together and keeping diaries about it. But the best part is what's missing from the story: how these two know each other. One of O'Nan's earliest novels was The Speed Queen, which was called Dear Stephen King until lawyers intervened...though not so much that it isn't fairly obvious who death-row inmate Marjorie Standiford is telling her story to.

"She's a fan, I'm a fan," O'Nan told me back in '97. "The book is as much a tribute as a fair-handed parody of some of the things he does. A lot of the story is his territory. She is one of his characters, and she recognizes that even before she starts telling him that. She's lived her life as one of his characters." Anyway, legal wrangling aside, King came away a fan of O'Nan's work--not surprising, since he's about as prolific as King himself and, though given more respect by arbiters of literary taste, has just as much of an eye for the horrifying.