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)
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