It was first published by Secker & Warburg, and is better known for the 1971 film adaptation Straw Dogs (starring Dustin Hoffman) by Sam Peckinpah.

[1] In the climax of the book, child killer Henry Niles is being transported back to prison when his ambulance hits ice and crashes.

Niles sees blood and flees, worried that he will be blamed, and George accidentally hits him in a snow drift with his car and takes him back to the farm, not knowing who he is.

[1] The idea for the book came from the panic and sense of siege where Williams lived in Devon when "The Mad Axeman" Frank Mitchell escaped from nearby Dartmoor Prison.

Williams wrote the book in nine days[3] – "he dashed off the final page to catch the post office van"[4] – and received £300 from the publisher.

[2] Author Ian Rankin wrote that "This novel is quite different to the eventual movie version, being a complex examination of modern-day masculinity and liberal values.

[3] For the 1971 film adaptation, writers Sam Peckinpah and David Zelag Goodman changed several aspects of the novel's story while keeping the overall plot.

"[2] George and Louise Magruder are renamed David and Amy Sumner, and their eight-year-old daughter, Karen, does not exist in the film.