Stephen King on killing off characters in his books:

King recalled that when he had a character kick a dog to death in his novel "The Dead Zone," he received more letters of complaint than ever, to his surprise.

"You want to be nice and say 'I'm sorry you didn't like that,' but I'm thinking to myself number one, he was a dog not a person, and number two, the dog wasn't even real," he said."I made that dog up, it was a fake dog, it was a fictional dog, but people get very, very involved," King said.