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:
“There have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of Nature herself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He’s indestructible. Frankenstein’s creation is man’s challenge to the laws of life and death.”
—Edward T. Lowe, and Erle C. Kenton. Dr. Edelman (Onslow Stevens)
“The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)