BOOKS there are BOOKS books are so GOOD

And also really confusing. 

"Hey! I'm back and can answer questions if you have them." 

"This book contains many factual inaccuracies about haunted hotels."

"...there's an argument to be made that the Overlook is more sentient than it is haunted, I don't know how far you've gotten but Grady's ghost doesn't talk like you'd expect a high school dropout to, he talks like someone who's trying to be as appealing to an articulate well-read writer as possible — anyway, not the point, the point is that I'd be pretty surprised if Stephen King patterned his writing off of things that actually exist. What are the inaccuracies?" 

"Places that are people are almost never malicious, is the thing. You're much more likely to get a street that does drag than a street that tries to bring out the worst in you. And if it's a haunting, which is much more likely to be malicious, then the hotel has abilities that ghosts generally do not."

"That makes sense. I don't know if I'd say the hotel is a person but it definitely seems like more than a haunting, given all of the everything. — humans write a lot about ghosts and vampires and werewolves and magic and I'd honestly be more surprised at a book being accurate than I would at a book not being accurate." 

"It's right that places that exert a psychic influence on you can't make you do things you absolutely wouldn't do, they just draw out what's already there."

"You might not have gotten to the part where the Overlook is literally possessing his body, it does that at the end." 

"Yeah, places can't do that. They can, like, teleport, or create things, that sort of thing."

"Yeah. It's a horror novel, it's not going for realism." 

"But it's all wrong. I know Sunnydale Syndrome is a thing so of course humans don't know about magic, but it's literally all wrong."

"...I mean... yeah? It's an evil eldritch sentient hotel that's activated by people's psychic powers, in a book written by someone who doesn't believe in the existence of ghosts or sentient places or psychic powers. The book isn't really taking place in the real world, it's taking place in a world where sometimes places with particularly grisly histories are sentient and evil and trying to eat you, and in that world, this is how those places work." 

"I dunno, it's like if a fairy wrote a book about humans, and there was an issue because none of the humans liked being slaves but because the Fugitive Slave Act was passed no one can rescue the slaves. Some of the details are right but mostly you clearly have no idea what you're talking about."

"I know it's wrong and none of us have any idea what we're talking about. It isn't trying to be right, it's a made up thing from a story, the thing that makes it work is that it's internally consistent, not that it's how things really work. I would love to read the story written by fairies where nobody could rescue the slaves because of the Fugitive Slave Act, if the fairy who wrote it was good at making their made-up version of humans consistent." 

"...Sorry."

"...this isn't like the math thing, I'm not upset, I'm just not sure how to get at the thing I mean. Most of the point of my favorite kinds of books is that the world of the book doesn't work like the real world. 

You might like A Face Like Glass better, I'm sure it's totally wrong about magic but it seems like it'd have less of the almost-correct-but-not-quite thing." 

"...If I read books that are wrong about things then they might be wrong about humans too and I want to understand humans."

"— no, that's the thing, the Torrances are a great example of how humans work. In that case I do not recommend A Face Like Glass, though, I recommend basically everything by Stephen King and also I should find Suffer the Children like I've been meaning to." 

"Humans are weird." He bounces. "If I can look like a human can I go to school and learn about how humans work?"

"...what's Sunnydale Syndrome?" 

"With a handful of exceptions, baseline humans can't believe in magic. They'll round it off to the nearest thing that isn't magic-- a gang shooting, or drugs, or someone filming a movie."

"...oh." 

There's a long pause before he says,

"Thank you." 

"Why?"

"...oh."  

"...I always thought I was seeing things, but it. Looks like maybe I wasn't."