Academics, media hounds, and ordinary people around the country are asking whether Cho Seung-Hui's violent writings could have, or should have, predicted his murderous rampage this week at Virginia Tech. So what is the difference between Cho Seung-Hui and a successful horror novelist like Stephen King? In his latest essay On Predicting Violence, Stephen King writes,

For most creative people, the imagination serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never actually do (James Patterson, for instance, a nice man who has all too often worked the street that my old friend George used to work). Cho doesn't strike me as in the least creative, however. Dude was crazy. Dude was, in the memorable phrasing of Nikki Giovanni, ''just mean.'' Essentially there's no story here, except for a paranoid a--hole who went DEFCON-1. He may have been inspired by Columbine, but only because he was too dim to think up such a scenario on his own.

On the whole, I don't think you can pick these guys out based on their work, unless you look for violence unenlivened by any real talent.