The book started off as a lark, but didn’t finish up that way. It stopped being a lark, when I realized that the kid would have to die-and that I had never had to deal with the consequences of death on a rational level.
I have always been aware of the things I didn’t want to write about. The death of a child is one-and the death of Tad Trenton at the end of Cujo was bad enough, but I didn’t have to deal with the aftermath. And I always shied away from the entire funeral process-the aftermath of death. The funeral parlors, the burial, the grief, and, particularly where you are dealing with the death of a healthy child, the guilt-the feeling that you are somehow at fault. And for me it was like looking through a window into something that could be.
I decided that, if I was going to write this book, perhaps it would be good for me-in the Calvinist sense-to go through with it, to find out everything, and to see what would happen.
But in trying to cope with these things, the book ceased being a novel to me, and became instead a gloomy exercise, like an endless marathon run. It never left my mind; it never ceased to trouble me. I was trying to teach school, and the boy was always there, the funeral home was always there, the mortician’s room was always there.
And when I finished I put the book in a drawer.