His tweet was tactless. Maybe not offensive, but sufficiently annoying that Dre decided to block him from his feed. Dre didn’t even follow him; his tweet had been promoted by Twitter’s algorithms. Twitter had conspicuously inserted the tweet among others about the frailty of the modern republican system of government. But the moment Dre blocked the tweet’s originator, his Twitter application froze. Dre tapped the screen of his phone, at first with purpose but then with a dumbness reminiscent of an early homo poking at a new object. Dre was accustomed to his technology just working, and his phone’s failure to respond to his commands kindled a dormant frustration that boiled greater with every passing second of non-responsiveness. As Dre touched the various soft-keys that normally elicited an appropriate and satisfactory response, he realized that something more serious had transpired. His phone appeared bricked, and the culprit was a tweet, a blocked Twitter account, an account owned by Stephen King. Dre’s frustration broke momentarily as he considered the irony. A modern horror, Dre thought, caused by a modern horror writer. It felt suitable, nearly forgivable. But a true horror was never confined to the benign.