When she finished it, she asked him, “How much of the paperhanger is you, and how much of you is the paperhanger?” William shrugged and said it was just a story. Made-up characters.

“I don’t think she believed me,” he said.

The romance ended shortly thereafter.

There’s the one about where “The Paperhanger” came from: a plumber who worked a construction job with William when William was younger. The plumber told how he’d been doing a different job, under some rich lady’s sink, when her “lapdog” ran in and bit him on the ankle. Before he thought he’d whacked the little dog in the head with his pipe wrench and killed it. Here she comes, clicking through the house in her heels, and he takes the limp dog and lifts out the tray in his toolbox and drops in the dog and replaces the tray, finishes the job. Gets paid. Drives away, flings the dog out the window

The lesson here, I tell students, is that in “The Paperhanger,” William raises the stakes by changing the dog to a little girl. Makes a tragedy out of a comedy.

He loved his long titles, which he said hearkened to Flannery O’Connor. “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down,” “Those Deep Elm’s Brown Ferry Blues,” “Love and Closure on the Life’s Highway,” “Come Home, Come Home, It’s Suppertime,” “Charting the Territories of the Red,” “Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?” And even “The Paperhanger,” whose original title was, “The Paperhanger, the Doctor’s Wife, and the Child Who Went into the Abstract,” until, at Sewanee, in 1999, Barry Hannah told him what to call it.

A huge horror fan, William was pleased when one of his literary heroes, Stephen King, chose Twilight as the Best Book of 2007 for the magazine Entertainment Weekly. King was supposed to call him—William had become friends with King’s younger son, Owen, also a writer. The two talked Bob Dylan endlessly, William said. Then Owen told William his father was going to ring him up. For most of us writers, such an occasion would be a career high. Typical for him, William didn’t answer. Maybe in his garden.

William had written a short horror novel, he told me. Little Sister Death. He’d long been fascinated by the Bell Witch phenomenon in Tennessee, and even had his own encounter with, perhaps, an echo of the Bell Witch herself.

This novel is the most metafictional thing William ever wrote—it’s about a writer, obsessed with a haunting, who moves his family to the site. Parts of the book seem to be what Binder, the protagonist, is himself researching and, ultimately, writing. The dispassionate quality of these episodes is chilling. There are paragraphs that shine light into William’s own writing process as well: “Binder hated dances but privately he thought he might be able to use it for the book, and if not this one for another. When he was working he always felt hypersensitive to stimuli, to things he ordinarily wouldn’t even notice, and later in his manuscripts he would come across things that had brought back moments of remembering, bits of conversation he had overheard, or simply the way someone had looked.”

Little Sister Death is also about how a story can seize and absorb a writer and even transport him to dark, dangerous places. How the necessary obsessions of writing can cause its practitioners to risk alienating or losing not only their loved ones but (perhaps) their sanity as well. Many of Binder’s traits and much of his history matches William’s, who became a very different man from the one his wife married. He would work during the day, as expected, carpentering, painting, hanging drywall, and then go home not to give himself over to his wife. Instead, he’d lock himself in to his true work, writing stories and novels, his wife outside the literal and figurative door, a widow to his craft who left him once their four children were grown, saying she “didn’t sign on to be married to John-Boy Walton.”

The last time I saw William was in Clarksville, Tennessee, at a writing conference. We stayed up late in his hotel room and talked about the same things we always did. He looked older, frailer. His face was longer and he seemed to have lost weight, though there hadn’t been any weight to lose. Yet we laughed and he smoked and I drank my beer and he his coffee and at some point I got up and hugged him goodnight and crossed the street to my sleeping family.

The last time I spoke to him was the day before he died. I’d just put him on speakerphone to a class of beginning fiction writers at Ole Miss, where I teach.