Imprinted On Meeting A Distinct Sensibility
I first encountered this dynamic with Monty Python. People who saw Life of Brian first were convinced it was a better movie as surely as the people who saw Holy Grail as their first Python knew in their bones it was superior. After a while I realized that it was probably that the Python sensibility was so distinctive and unprecedented (unless you were well steeped in British post-war OxBridge humor from Goon Squad on...) that the first time you encountered it you would get rewired by the experience.

This came to mind this morning as I was listening to an R.E.M. collection and remembering with some bogglement that I knew people who thought Document or Fables of the Reconstruction were the best R.E.M. albums. And they *are* excellent albums, but mostly I recalled that people tended to fall in love with their first R.E.M. album no matter which one it was.

I haven't had as much anecdotal evidence but I suspect Jonathan Carroll's novels are similar. At least for me, reading Voice of Our Shadow totally suckerpunched me and caused a Wow sensation. Whereas, Land of Laughs (which he wrote first) was very enjoyable but more familiar.

I'm trying to think of others where I've had a similar experience. Probably Jim Thompson's hardboiled fic. I read Hell Of A Woman as my first Thompson and it's my favorite and the one that really branded my brain with his style.

Tom Waits too, I think. Though he was impenetrable to me until I slowly slowly got sucked into Swordfishtrombones and then it was like stepping through the looking glass and seeing his whole world of imagery as being of a piece and almost physically being in his songs.