The Pillowman tells the tale of Katurian, a fiction writer living in a police state, who is interrogated about the gruesome content of his short stories and their similarities to a number of bizarre child murders occurring in his town.
“The Pillowman” stemmed, in part, from McDonagh`s experience of composing fairy tales early in his writing career. Attempting to rewrite fairy tales he remembered from childhood, he realized that “there`s something dark about them that doesn`t quite come through.”