It’s never as simple as answering, “What book are you reading right now?” I usually have four or five going at once — most of them nonfiction. Histories, craft books, philosophy, the “how did this happen and why does it still matter?” kind of material. Somewhere along the way, I forgot how to read purely for pleasure. Training does that. Once you learn to take stories apart, you stop seeing them as entertainment and start seeing them as machines.
Even when a novel doesn’t fully work, I still take a wrench to it.
I listen for the knock in the engine, the missed beat in a line of dialogue, the moment the writer blinked instead of pushing through. I can enjoy a book, absolutely — but I enjoy it like a mechanic listening to an engine idling just a little rough.
And here’s the part I’m almost embarrassed to admit: I can’t bring myself to write in books. Feels like a cardinal sin. So instead I’ve got notebooks scattered all over the house — pages filled with scribbles, arrows, fragments, arguments I’m having with an author who isn’t in the room. I finally gave in and bought one of those e-reader gizmos that lets you highlight the digital version. It feels like cheating, but at least I’m not defacing paper. A technicality, but I’ll take the loophole.
So when someone asks what I’m reading, they expect a title.
But the truth is, I’m running an autopsy.
And the books on my desk right now — Under the Dome by Stephen King and L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy — are the kind that don’t give up their secrets easily. Which is exactly why they matter.
Stephen King gets labeled “the Master of Horror,” but that’s just a convenience for the shelf. King’s real mastery is building pressure systems — closed environments where the air tightens and ordinary people start showing their real faces. In Under the Dome, the dome could be aliens, magic, or a freak atmospheric event; it doesn’t matter. It’s a magnifying glass. It forces truth to the surface.
King understands that people don’t transform under pressure — they’re revealed. Chester’s Mill doesn’t turn violent because of the dome. The dome just takes away the freedom to pretend.
And that’s where the cognitive dissonance hits.
You read something wild — a man electrocuted by an invisible barrier, the town fracturing into fear and paranoia — and your mind rejects it. “People aren’t like this,” you think. But rewind thirty seconds. You heard a crash outside your window, put the book down, checked it out, and watched your neighbor scream at a trash can like it betrayed him. You shook your head at the nonsense, then came back to a fictional scene that suddenly feels easier to believe than real life.
That’s King’s trick.
He shows you something unbelievable so you finally acknowledge the truth you’ve been ignoring.
Ellroy, on the other hand, doesn’t need supernatural pressure.
He starts inside the rot.
In L.A. Confidential, corruption isn’t a plot device — it’s oxygen. The moral decay isn’t creeping in; it’s already soaked into every wall, badge, and handshake. His characters don’t break down over time. They begin the story already fractured, already bent by pressures they barely acknowledge. Ellroy’s cognitive dissonance comes from the reader wanting to believe people aren’t this cruel, this compromised, this hungry for power and absolution.
But then your phone buzzes with a news alert and disproves that hope in under four seconds.
Ellroy doesn’t distort reality.
He removes the polite language that keeps us comfortable.
King writes about what happens when the walls close in.
Ellroy writes about what happens when the walls never existed in the first place.
King exposes human nature by turning up the pressure.
Ellroy exposes human nature by turning off the excuses.
One town collapses because the dome forces truth to the surface.
The other city collapses because truth was never allowed to stand upright.
Both men understand something we work very hard to avoid:
The unbelievable is always happening.
The unbelievable has always been happening.
We just prefer to call it fiction.
So when someone asks what I’m reading, the short answer is Under the Dome and L.A. Confidential.
But the real answer is: I’m reading two authors who drag the human condition out into the open, each in their own way — King through the surreal, Ellroy through the hyperreal. Both force you to look at the reflection, even when you’d rather look away.
And maybe that’s the part we pretend not to see —
the truth isn’t hiding from us.
We’re hiding from it.
Memoirs of Madness 