George R. Stewart, born in 1895, three years after Darger, commits a similar act of narrative insubordination in Storm, which has sold over a million copies in more than twenty languages. It is commonplace for hack reviewers to credit a novelist with turning an inhuman presence—a house of seven gables, a man-eating shark, the city of New Orleans—into “a character of its own.” But actually to do so, to situate an entire novel on the story of an inanimate, shapeless force, violates a fundamental law of novel writing—that one’s protagonist should have an inner life, or if not that, free will, or if not that, at the very least a consciousness. Though the novelistic form, as E. M. Forster has written, is “tirelessly occupied with human relationships,” Storm’s relationships are only half human, with its center of gravity resting unevenly on the inhuman half.

Stewart credited his inspiration for Storm to an experience that today, nearly seventy years later, is drearily familiar, at least during our ever-dilating hurricane seasons: reading in the newspaper of a catastrophic storm. He was in Mexico at the time, an English professor on sabbatical from the University of California, Berkeley, and was surprised to find news in the local paper about the large storms of his home state. As he later told an interviewer, “It seemed to me that anything which was so interesting as to be reported to people clear off in Mexico, should have a story in it.” He already had a feel for the subject, living in the Berkeley Hills. “I had watched the winter storm-fronts sweep in from the West with all their majesty,” he said. “No observing person can live in such a spot without becoming storm-conscious.” No observing person can live in the twenty-first century without becoming storm-conscious, but in this, as in so much else, Stewart was decades ahead of his time.

To research the novel he became a storm chaser, grabbing his car keys whenever a weather report mentioned blizzards or landslides. He rode on a locomotive cowcatcher through Donner Pass and on a flatcar through Feather River Canyon; he stowed away in the engine of a snowplow and toured storm-damaged utility plants. Having been impressed with a storm’s “dramatic values,” he began to realize that a storm “had most of the qualities of a living thing.” “Most” is the workhorse of that sentence, though Stewart committed to his scheme with Darger-esque ardor, deciding that the storm would be not only the novel’s subject but, quite literally, its protagonist.