(This is an excerpt from a story in which Pete (the child from "Among the Pioneers") goes to a matinee at a mall in 1965 and is terrified by The Fly. But before he enters the theater, he wanders the mall with his mother, who lets him explore a bookstore.)
... he recently discovered not only how to read but why—for the same reason that, when he saw a closed door, whether in curiosity or fear he wanted to open it—she set him loose in the bookstore to look through Dr. Seuss books and Go, Dog, Go! and Scrappy the Pup—even though he thought of them as little kid books, compared to his comics; but he loved the pictures, big and simple or fine-drawn and scratchy, with intricate details or just blotches of color floating in the background. Like Alice, he would never entirely lose his preference for books with pictures and conversations.
But he also found himself in the Humor section, where paperback reissues of 1950s E.C. comics lurked, the old Mad with its strange, almost menacing warping of comic books and Sunday Funnies—and, with little warning, alongside he found the gore-dripping nightmares of The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear. Glancing into their moral tales—in which every human sin is punishable only by dismemberment, beheading, live internment, or splattering consumption, all with a Medieval sense of justice exacted in suburban tract houses and tenement apartments—he felt his chest spread a sickening warmth all the way to the top of his head and down to his belly, which tightened with nausea—and he felt a kind of ugly pleasure constricted by that frozen hollowness which in later life he would know as despair. He could barely stand to touch those paperbacks, and couldn’t let himself put them down—until his mother approached and he instead grabbed a book of elephant jokes.
“Hey Mom,” he said, his face making up a smile, “How do elephants earn money? Babysitting for bluebirds!” He showed her the drawing of an elephant up a tree and they left to walk down to the movie theater.
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