Meet the Marquis de Sade of the puzzle world (who “says he dreams of being a former crossword constructor, but it’s not clear what else he would do.”)

He lives and works in Brooklyn now, not far from Prospect Park, in a small wooden house so barricaded to guests that he barely lets the cable man in. “I’m the guy that inspired the phrase ‘Doesn’t play well with others,’ ” he says. On most days, he wakes up by seven, does a word search to get his eyes focussed, and then spends the day shuttling between his crossword grids, his reference books, and the television. More and more crossword constructors are relying on computer programs and data bases of common clues. Hook uses only a pencil (“A computer looks really stupid tucked behind your ear”), yet he has been known to come up with twenty-four crosswords and write more than fifteen hundred clues in three days.

[…] Crosswords aren’t so different from life, one constructor told me. You start out floundering in a void, plagued by questions. And then, little by little, you begin to find answers. You build gradually on your knowledge, or make mistakes and double back, and pretty soon you find that everything is connected to everything else. But if crosswords can be addictive—if some people love them nearly to the point of folly—it may be because real life hardly enters into them. Here every problem has a solution, and pain, disease, violence, and despair never make it to the grid. “When you solve a crossword, you don’t want death or Nazis thrown in your face,” Will Shortz says. “If there is a seventy-year-old woman who is filling out the grid and she’s got ‘__uck,’ I can’t imagine making her add an ‘F.’ ”

[I’m grateful for David’s feeding me blinks like this from The New Yorker!]