Unable to accept the turn of events and move on, David begins laboring under the increasingly self-deluding hope that Annabelle will leave her new husband.

Under the assumed identity of William Neumeister, a freelance journalist who frequently travels, David buys a cabin in the country to serve as his eventual home with Annabelle.

David reports the death to the police, identifying himself as Neumeister and describing Gerald as a belligerent stranger who showed up at his door and, spoiling for a fight, was killed accidentally.

Two of David's friends, Wes Carmichael and Effie Brennan, once secretly followed him to the house and, after the death of Gerald, suspect him of a duality about which they question him over time and with escalating incisiveness.

He wrote:[3] Objectively yet compassionately she examines a young chemist who spends his weekends in a make-believe in which that girl did not marry somebody else; and relentlessly she shows how his rejection of reality leads to disaster and death.

The book has the compulsion of truth; and probably only a professional reviewer in a heavy season would protest that she might have got the same results in something under 100,000 words.This Sweet Sickness was adapted in 1962 for an episode of the anthology television series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.