Creation
After the success of Ghost Story, Straub struggled to generate a plot that would prove just as financially successful without being derivative of that work. He settled on the idea of Koko's murderous Vietnam veteran, and then wrote and re-wrote, ultimately completing the project after four years. Straub has described Koko as being "emotionally richer" than any of his prior works. He says that while writing it, he tried to mimic the "transparent" and "antiseptic" style of two stories from his collection Houses Without Doors: "Blue Rose" and "The Juniper Tree".
Koko shares characters with several of Straub's other works. The character of Timothy Underhill, for example, subsequently reappeared in the novels The Throat, Lost Boy, Lost Girl, and In the Night Room, and he was mentioned in Mystery. A short prequel to Koko, the short story "The Ghost Village", was also published in Straub's 2000 collection Magic Terror. The town of Milburn, which was the primary setting of Ghost Story, is briefly featured in Koko.
Read more about this topic: Koko (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word creation:
“Like witches they flew along rows
Keeping creation at ease;
With a tendril for needle
They sewed up the air with a stem;”
—Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)
“A fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common things ... or it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)