The idea for the novel began as a plan to create a series of humorous animated YouTube videos about angry teddy bears. The concept was built around a contradiction: cute little bears that turn out to be creatures with complex and conflicting personalities. The character itself first appeared about ten years ago, evolving from a drawing I made for a very good friend. To keep him from looking like an ordinary teddy bear, I deliberately gave him a more complicated backstory: he had lost an eye in a fight.

In any case, for various reasons, the idea of making the videos had to be abandoned. Still, it seemed a shame to simply walk away from the project. By that point, the characters’ personalities and visual designs had already been developed in considerable detail, and a plot—primitive though it was—was beginning to take shape.

By the way, the title itself is a play on the words pallbearer and bear.

Gradually, new characters appeared—not bears this time, but people. The story accumulated mysteries, tragedies, and supernatural elements. The Pallbears, once grumpy comic characters who could occasionally be a little too cruel, became unwilling captives of a cycle of violence created by humanity itself.

Despite that, I tried to cultivate an impossible hope within a darkness from which there is no return.

Here, the reader becomes a witness to unfolding events, as the novel is published chapter by chapter while it is still being written. On the pages of my website, the story lives and grows, steadily building critical mass until it either explodes in a colorful firework display of a climax—or, having lost its momentum, collapses in on itself like a dying star. But that is for you to decide.

For some reason, every story I write ends up being deeply personal. Not because I have personally witnessed the events being described, but because I place myself in the position of every character I create and experience their feelings and emotions as my own. It is I who make the decisions: for the bears, for the merciless killer, for his victims, and even for the most insignificant supporting characters, all based on the lives and histories I have imagined for them.

If you have found your way here, that is already an event in itself. It means the story has broken free from the confines of an idea and begun to live.