Development
Ellis finished writing the novel in the summer of 2004. Ellis said the book was an homage to Stephen King and the comic books he loved as a child.
Ellis told the Manchester Evening News that the Terby "is based on a Furby but also there was this bird-like doll that my older sister had and I wrote a short story about it when I was 7 or 8. She used to scare me with it, I'd go to my bedroom and get into bed and it'd be there, she'd hide it there just to scare me. Or I'd be walking up the stairs and she'd chase me with it. And I think that's what I was channelling and it fitted in to all the other things that I was haunted by.” The revelation that 'Terby' is in fact 'Y Bret' (Why, Bret?) spelt backwards is an homage to the "redrum" (murder spelt backwards) plot device in King's The Shining.
The book carries an epigraph from Hamlet 1.v.98. This connects with the theme of haunting by a father as well as the names in the book (e.g. Elsinore, Osric, Fortinbras).
Read more about this topic: Lunar Park
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“Creativity seems to emerge from multiple experiences, coupled with a well-supported development of personal resources, including a sense of freedom to venture beyond the known.”
—Loris Malaguzzi (20th century)
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
“Dissonance between family and school, therefore, is not only inevitable in a changing society; it also helps to make children more malleable and responsive to a changing world. By the same token, one could say that absolute homogeneity between family and school would reflect a static, authoritarian society and discourage creative, adaptive development in children.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)