A good many people helped me. One was my wife, Tabitha, who simply refused to call this novel by its original title, which was Cancer. She considered it both ugly and an invitation to bad luck and trouble. Eventually I came around to her way of thinking, and she no longer refers to it as “that book” or “the one about the shit-weasels”.
I’m also indebted to Bill Pula, who took me four-wheeling at the Quabbin Reservoir, and to his cohorts, Peter Baldracci, Terry Campbell, and Joe McGinn: Another group of people, who would perhaps prefer not to be named, took me out behind the Air National Guard base in a Humvee, and foolishly let me drive, assuring me I couldn’t get the beast stuck. I didn’t, but it was close. I came back mud-splattered and happy. They would also want me to tell you that Hummers are better in mud than in snow; I have fictionalized their capabilities in that regard to suit the course of my fiction.
Thanks are also in order to Susan Moldow and Nan Graham at Scribner’s, to Chuck Vem who edited the book, and to Arthur Greene, who agented it. And I mustn’t forget Ralph Vicinanza, my foreign rights agent who found at least six ways to say “There is no infection here” in French.
One final note. This book was written with the world’s finest word processor, a Waterman cartridge fountain pen. To write the first draft of such a long book by hand put me in touch with the language as I haven’t been for years. I even wrote one night (during a power outage) by candlelight. One rarely finds such opportunities in the twenty-first century, and they are to be savored.
And to those of you who have come so far, thank you for reading my story.
Stephen King