Originally published in Issue 13 of The Lamp.

How many people living in the United States today are illiterate? Let us assume these people can read traffic signs and don’t have to mark their signature with an X, but overall they live in a world without text. Information comes to them in sound and images. This functional illiteracy does not put these individuals, who surely number in the millions and may constitute a majority, among the dumbest of the dumb. It was for centuries the natural state of humanity. The government of Turkey, within the memory of people now living, employed town criers to spread its edicts to villages where being able to read a newspaper was enough to make a man a café celebrity. 

Mark Z. Danielewski can do a lot more than read a newspaper. He studied English at Yale under the poet John Hollander and then pursued a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California’s prestigious School of Cinematic Arts, where he worked on an award-winning documentary about Jacques Derrida. After collecting his last academic degree in 1993, he began work on a horror novel that would take advantage of all his erudition. By the time it was published in 2000, it would be a horror novel to mark the end of the age of literacy. 

Read the rest at The Lamp.