I was having lunch with the neighborhood ladies yesterday when the topic turned to authors. The woman sitting next to me had pre-ordered my new book, Under the Sand, and was excited to read it, she said. I had just met Susan and already liked her. A lot. But we weren’t talking about me. We were discussing Stephen King.

Another woman, Noelle is her name, said she has a friend who lives down the road from Stephen King on Casey Key, just south of Sarasota. One morning the friend was walking the beach. It was a dark and stormy morning, I guess, and the woman thought she was alone when she heard a noise behind her. The crunching of footsteps on the tiny shells that cover the sand startled her, making her uneasy. She turned and saw a dark figure looming.

“Oh, you scared me,” she said when she recognized him.

“That’s what I do,” Stephen King replied.

I might have fainted right there on the sand. Stand me next to a movie star and I feel nothing. Put me in the proximity of a famous author and I become tongue-tied. Or worse, say something stupid.

I’ll digress a minute to say that very thing happened to me when I found myself standing next to author Scott Turow (Presumed Innocent) a year or so ago at a cocktail party given by the local library. I was a silent participant in a lively group that included Turow, best-selling author Linda Fairstein, and Sam Skinner, former chief of staff for President George H. W. Bush. I was clearly outclassed.

When Skinner and Fairstein drifted away, leaving me alone with the author, I thought about what I could say that he would find scintillating and memorable.

“You know when you said about how you can lose yourself in your writing? Well, I know exactly how you feel because I’m a writer, too.”

Just pull out a gun and shoot me. Why didn’t I ask him what he was working on? I had just finished reading Suspect, his latest novel. Did he have something else in mind or does it take him a while to create his next best-seller? No, I had to try to interject myself into the conversation. He looked at his watch and said something about his driver coming to pick him up. I wanted to jump in the pool, which was about ten feet from where we were standing.

I shared that embarrassing story with the ladies at the luncheon because Noelle also knew some Scott Turow relatives from the Sarasota-area. The women at the table laughed with me, which was a good thing.

But back to Stephen King. Not only does he scare people, he also makes great book recommendations. On Facebook, someone posted a photo of him with the following: “What does Stephen King think is the scariest story ever written? It’s a tale by Fredric Brown about a man, alone in his apartment after everyone else in the world has died, and he hears a knock on the door.”

When I read that the hairs on my arms stood up. Who is Fredric Brown and where can I get his books? My old friend Wikipedia had the answer:

Fredric Brown was born in Cincinnati in 1906. He spent a year at Hanover College, Indiana, where I’m reasonably sure he must have met my dad who was there at the same time. Or maybe it’s just a wild coincidence that one of Brown’s characters was named Ed Hunter, which was the name of my father, who apparently was a rebel rouser in school.

“According to his wife, Brown hated to write, and did whatever he could to put it off: play his flute, challenge a friend to a game of chess, or tease Ming Tah, his Siamese cat. When Brown would have trouble with a certain story, he would take a long bus trip in order to sit and think for days on end. When he would finally return home to sit himself in front of the typewriter, he produced work in a variety of genres: mystery, science fiction, short fantasy, black comedy.”

I ordered Knock-Three-One-Two and when it came began reading. I can’t put it down. The book takes place over the span of a single evening. “A serial killer is on the loose, and while the maniac ties the city into knots, the lives of ordinary citizens are drawn into an inescapable spiral of greed and chance,” the back cover says.

Every sentence is masterful and the characters compelling. So much better than most stuff that is written today. And it has a good plot twist at the end. Thank you, SK, for bringing Frederic Brown into my reading life. I probably wouldn’t have been able to talk to him either. But I’m definitely loving his book.