The novel its author found most frightening, written in 1979 beside a Maine truck route and published only to fulfil a contract, in its first British edition and unclipped jacket.

In 1979 King was writer-in-residence at the University of Maine at Orono, living in a rented house at Orrington beside a major truck route that regularly killed the neighbourhoods dogs and cats. Nearby was a pet cemetery, where his daughter buried her cat Smucky after it was killed on the road. He completed the first draft in May 1979. King has said that of all his novels this is the one that genuinely frightened him most, and the manuscript lay in a drawer for about three years. It was published only when he needed a novel to fulfil a contract with Doubleday.

Doubleday published the novel in New York on 14 November 1983, and Hodder and Stoughton issued the British edition in the same year in black cloth and a pictorial jacket. Mary Lamberts film of 1989, with a screenplay by King himself, followed in April of that year, and a remake appeared in 2019.

First UK edition, first printing.Octavo. 368 pp. Original black cloth boards. Original pictorial dust jacket, unclipped.Dust jacket unclipped. Some faint markings to jacket covers and some toning along edges. Jacket spine lightly shelf faded. Volume rubbed lightly along edges. Contents very good. A bit browned along edges. A marking here and there internally.

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Catalogue Number: HH000698