Stephen King's got a new book out, Dreamcatcher, and I'm a few hundred pages into it.

The man is a force of nature. Slam into him with a two-ton van, and he'll start writing in intensive care, after the first operation. (Actually, he said he thought he might have been blocked there ... for a few days. I hate him.)

The man does walk the line, though. It can be easy to slide over from what might be really scary, to what is faintly ridiculous. This time he's got flying saucers, guys stuck out in the boondocks of Maine (actually, Maine is pretty much all boondocks, isn’t it?), and a Nameless Lovecraftian Horror ... pretty much as usual. This time the scary thing is a parasite of some sort that lives in one's body until it is ready to burst out. Explosively out. He acknowledges his debt to Alien, but the difference here is pure King. This Nameless Horror bursts out where things have traditionally burst out of people ... if they have a Nameless Case of Diarrhea. Before they die, they fart on a gigantic scale.

Trouble is, farting is intrinsically funny. Ask any second-grader. And no amount of dread, no amount of purple prose, no amount of florid description of just how cosmically awful the farts smell ... well, you see the problem. I've already laughed a few times where the author didn't really want me to. And sometimes you run across a sentence where you wonder if King spotted the joke, or just ran feverishly on. Things like, "At bottom, so-and-so thought ..."

But then I came to something that made it all worthwhile. It's on page 159. This dude has come stumbling out of the woods and is saved by two other dudes in a cabin. But as he sits there recovering, he starts delivering himself of really Lovecraftian farts. The thing inside him has eaten its fill, and is about to burst out, rectally ...

Which it does, while the dude is sitting on the toilet. Our heroes break down the door, and he looks dead, sitting there, but is he dead? They talk it over. The dead man farts again. One character has this to say:

"Christ almighty, the stink of it!" Beaver cried. He had the heel of his hand over his mouth and nose and his words were muffled. "But if he can fart, he must be alive. Huh, Jonesy?"

Well, I had an epiphany. He can fart, therefore he is alive. I'm no Latin scholar, but we all know a Latin phrase here and there, and a famous three-word one came to mind. Here are Beaver's words translated into Latin:

"Flatulo, ergo sum."

I stink, therefore I am.