Note: "Like 'Salem's Lot, it was written while I was very much under the influence of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Thornton Wilder's Our Town. I grew up in a small town (Durham, Maine, pop. 960), and for awhile in my twenties I felt an almost constant urge to capture that world of dirt roads, abandoned houses, and general stores full of old men, old baked bean supper posters, and old flypaper. I conceived of a house that would grow every time some old campaigner in the town kicked the bucket ... a kind of rambling New England memorial that was half-crypt, half living organism. I should add that, as well as the two books mentioned above, "It Grows On You" shows the influence of the late Davis Grubb, who wrote wonderful, mystic tales drawn from his own rural heritage in West Virginia. ("When I get to the other side," the epigraph to Grubb's The Voices of Glory reads, "I shall tell the Lord all about West Virginia.") The story of Grubb's which is most stylistically similar to "It Grows On You" is the classic "Where the Woodbine Twineth." "It Grows On You" was originally written in 1973, rewritten in 1975 for publication in a small-circulation literature magazine called Marshroots. I've rewritten it a third time for its real debut, here in Whispers. It's one of the few stories from that period that I really love, and I hope you'll enjoy it." [info from Whispers magazine (August 1982), reprinted at http://thetruthinsidethelie.blogspot.com/]