Sometimes a novel thought long dead can come back to life, brush the dirt off its pages, and shuffle back into an author’s career. That’s happening now to Allan Gurganus and his novel “The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church,” which he abandoned after three years’ work in 1982, just before beginning “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.” A century-­spanning tale of a rural congregation’s spiritual development and sexual misconduct, “Erotic” had proved too much for its young author. But all these years later, “The dinosaur bones of the church novel show signs of quickening flesh,” he proclaimed. “Now, in my early 60s, I know almost enough. Though I’m more apt to forget, that leaves me freer to invent.”

Gurganus can take inspiration from Stephen King, whose recent “Under the Dome” is a complete rewrite of a failed novel from 30 years ago called “The Cannibals.” “The character list kept growing, and they didn’t connect, and I just got to a point where I dropped it,” King remembered. But three decades later, a fresh shot at the concept worked: “It was like my mind was working on it underneath.” King is sanguine enough about his failures to have published the original “Cannibals” — and another botch, “The Plant,” about a carnivorous vine that takes over a publishing house — online. “Look, writing a novel is like paddling from Boston to London in a bathtub,” he said. “Sometimes the damn tub sinks. It’s a wonder that most of them don’t.”

As for Chabon, the fragments of “Fountain City” published this year offer a glimpse into a writer’s process and progress. It’s evident Chabon still can’t believe the wrong turns his “wrecked” novel takes — disbelief that shades, at times, into disdain for his feckless former self. “Wow, what a coincidence!” he notes mockingly, when the reception clerk at a Paris flophouse happens to be the student of the very architect who had sent the hero’s father a mysterious postcard from Israel. “Life is rife with coincidence.” You sort of want to give him a hug and remind him that unsuccessful novels happen to everybody.

But “Fountain City” is perhaps most valuable in its cataloging of the emotional state of a writer trapped, to extend Chabon’s shipwreck metaphor further, in the hold of a sinking novel. “Often when I sat down to work,” he writes in his introduction, “I would feel a cold hand take hold of something inside my belly and refuse to let go. It was the Hand of Dread. I ought to have heeded its grasp.” Most every writer who was willing to talk about an abandoned novel admitted to feeling that Hand of Dread while struggling with her own unruly book.

And even those who declined to discuss any long-buried novels hinted, by their tone, that the Hand of Dread had visited them, too. “I won’t even cop to whether or not I have abandoned novels,” Joshua Ferris, author of “Then We Came to the End,” wrote in an e-mail. But if he did have one, he continued, “It would be dead to me for a reason: because it should be dead to everyone else. Oh yes, dead, most dead, deader than dead.”