“Oh, yeah,” my dad said. “Check out Such Men Are Dangerous, the novel Block wrote as Paul Kavanagh. That book is less like a novel, more like getting mugged in an alley.” Such Men Are Dangerous was the story of an ex-soldier who had done ugly things in the war and come home looking to do some ugly things right here. While it has been decades since I read it, I think my dad’s assessment was roughly correct. Bradbury’s sentences were firecrackers on a summer night. Kavanagh’s were blows from a lead pipe. Larry Block seemed like a real nice guy. Paul Kavanagh didn’t.

Around that time I started to wonder who I’d be if I weren’t me anymore.

I WROTE THREE OTHER NOVELS in my high-school years. They shared one common artistic thread: They all sucked. Even then, though, I understood that this was normal. Prodigies are almost always tragic figures, who blaze hot for a couple of years and are reduced to cinders by the time they’re twenty. Everyone else has to do it the slow way, the hard way, one dull shovel-load of dirt at a time. That slow, hard work rewards a person by building up the mental and emotional muscles, and possibly establishing a firmer foundation on which to build a career. Then, when setbacks come, you’re ready for them. After all, you’ve faced them before.

In college, naturally enough, I began to think about trying to get some of my stories published. I was afraid, though, to submit work under my own name. So far, I knew, I had not written anything worth reading. How would I know when I’d written something good, really good? I worried I might send out a crummy book and someone would publish it anyway, because they saw a chance to make a quick buck on the last name. I was insecure, often gripped by peculiar (and unrealistic) anxieties, and I needed to know, for myself, that when I sold a story, it sold for the right reasons.

So I dropped my last name and began writing as Joe Hill. Why Hill? It was an abbreviated form of my middle name, Hillström—and in retrospect, oh, man, what was I thinking, right? The umlaut is the hardest-rocking unit of punctuation in the English language, and I have one in my name, and I didn’t use it. My one chance to be metal, and I blew it.