When I began this novel, my intent was to write a short story about a kinky undertaker who’d been misburying dead folks and the sister and brother who engineer a misbegotten attempt to blackmail him. Then, when I wrote the confrontation between Fenton Breece and the sister, I saw that all of it could not be told in a short story. It became a sort of gothic fairy tale, a fable of a luckless Hansel and Gretel who, each time the road diverges in the dark woods, seem fated to choose the wrong path.
