EVERY BOOK TELLS TWO stories: one concerns the characters, the other the author, and how he happened to write such a book. Death in the Castle began some years ago in England. With Tad Danielewski, my partner in Stratton Productions, I visited a beautiful ancient castle. Out of its hoary shadows and castellated towers the characters emerged, fictitious and yet so strangely vivid that their story unfolded in my mind in an instant
Since Tad Danielewski is a stage and screen director, we immediately fell into a discussion of how their story was to be presented. He thought in film, I thought in novel. We decided upon a cooperative effort. I wrote the novel, he wrote the screenplay. The work went on almost simultaneously.
Perhaps the reader will find the same enchantment that I experienced when the story took shape, as if in double exposure—one faithfully echoing the other, promising a new kind of excitement generated by the magic of the screen and the participating audience.
The purpose of art is communication, but in the arts each uses its own means, and each gains its own response. In the novel the reader is required to exert his creative imagination in order to participate. In the film participation is more direct and less subjective, for the viewer feels that he is actively transported into the scene itself.
We bring you both: now the novel, a little later the film, of Death in the Castle.
—PEARL S. BUCK