Eventually the truck would mash us and my dad would make a screaming-shrieking sound and weave this way and that along the road, to indicate we were dead. He might drive for a full minute with his tongue hanging out and his glasses askew to indicate the truck had schmucked him good. It was always a blast, dying on the road together, the father and the son and the unholy Eighteen-Wheeler of Evil.

MY DAD READ TO ME about the Green Goblin, but my mother read to me about Narnia. Her voice was (is) as calming as the first snowfall of the year. She read about betrayal and cruel slaughter with the same patient certainty that she read about resurrection and salvation. She is not a religious woman, but to hear her read is to feel a little as if you’re being led into a soaring Gothic cathedral, filled with light and a roomy sense of space.

I remember Aslan dead on the stone and the mice nibbling at the ropes that bound his corpse. I think that provided me with my foundational sense of decency. To live a decent life is to be no more than a mouse nibbling at a rope. One mouse isn’t much, but if enough of us keep chewing, we may set something free that can save us from the worst. Maybe it will even save us from ourselves.

I also still believe that books operate along the same principles as enchanted wardrobes. You climb into that little space and come out the other side in a vast and secret world, a place both more frightening and more wonderful than your own.

MY PARENTS DIDN’T JUST READ stories—they wrote them, too, and as it happened, they were both very good at it. My dad was so successful at it they put him on the cover of Time magazine. Twice! They said he was America’s boogeyman. By then Alfred Hitchcock was dead, so somebody had to be. My dad didn’t mind. America’s boogeyman is a good-paying gig.

Directors were turned on by my father’s ideas, and producers were turned on by money, so a lot of the books were made into films. My father became friends with a well-regarded independent filmmaker named George A. Romero. Romero was the shaggy, rebel auteur who kind of invented the zombie apocalypse with his film Night of the Living Dead, who kind of forgot to copyright it, and who, as a result, kind of didn’t get rich off it. The makers of The Walking Dead will be forever grateful to Romero for being so good at directing and so bad at protecting his intellectual property.