In 1985, 39-year-old
Stephen King announced in public that his pseudonymous alter
ego, Richard Bachman, was dead. (Never mind that he revived
him years later to write The Regulators.) At the beginning
of The Dark Half (1989), 39-year-old writer Thad Beaumont
announces in public that his own pseudonym, George Stark, is
dead. Now, King didn't want to jettison the Bachman novel,
titled Machine Dreams, that was he working on. So he
incorporated it in The Dark Half as the crime oeuvre of
George Stark, whose recurring hero/alter ego is an evil
character named Alexis Machine. Thad Beaumont's pseudonym is
not so docile as Stephen King's, though, and George Stark
bursts forth into reality. At that point, two stories kick
into gear: a mystery-detective story about the crime spree
of George Stark (or is it Alexis Machine?) and a horror
story about Beaumont's struggle to catch up with his
doppelganger and kill him dead.
This is not the first time that Stephen King has written a
dark allegory about the fiction writer's situation. As the
New York Times writes, "Misery (1987) is a parable in
chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his
audience, which holds him prisoner and dictates what he
writes, on pain of death. The Dark Half is a parable in
chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his
creative genius, the vampire within him, the part of him
that only awakes to raise Cain when he writes, the
fratricidal twin who occupies 'the womblike dungeon' of his
imagination.
Publisher's Weekly
The protagonist of King's top-notch new novel is literary
novelist Thad Beaumont, whose greatest success has come with
three gory thrillers written under the pseudonym George
Stark. (King himself wrote five novels under the pseudonym
Richard Bachman.) When a blackmailer threatens to reveal
Stark's identity (planning his scheme, he finds a new use
for PW 's ``People'' page), Beaumont and his literary agent
decide to foil the plan and capitalize on Stark's
``demise.'' But Stark, who of course was never alive, will
not stay dead either. Beaumont's alter ego (for Stark is
obviously more than just a pen name) seeks revenge against
all those involved in killing him off, and his murderous
rampage, gory and gripping, systematically reduces the ranks
of his enemies to Thad, his wife and two children. Stark's
aim--to force Beaumont to write another Stark novel--is
basically a variation on King's Misery , in which a deranged
fan held a writer captive until he wrote another novel
featuring the heroine whose life he had terminated in his
previous book. But this new King thriller is so wondrously
frightening that mesmerized readers won't be able fault the
master for reusing a premise that puts both Misery and The
Dark Half among the best of his voluminous work. 1,500,000
first printing; $500,000 ad/promo; BOMC main selection.
(Nov)
The New York Times Book Review - George Stade
On the whole, Mr. King is tactful in teasing out the
implications of his parable. . . . No character in the novel
comes right out and says, for example, that writers exist
(at least to readers) only in their writing, that each
person (at least to himself) is his own fiction, that the
writer's imagination can feel alien to him, a possessing and
possessive demon. . . . Such things arebetter left unsaid,
anyhow. Stephen King is not a post-modernist. He is,
however, a very good storyteller. 'The Dark Half' mostly
succeeds, as both parable and chiller, in spite of
occasional cliches of thought and expression and bits of
sophomoric humor. . . . Most readers, I believe, will want
decency andreality to triumph, but only with some
reluctance, only after their most monstrous imaginings, like
George Stark, have been unearthed and indulged. And few
writers around are better than Stephen King at giving
readers what they want.
Time
Another Stephen King blood leaker is loosed upon the world.
. . . {In this novel Stark} slices up Beaumont's agent and
editor and several other innocents with a straight razor, in
scenes so lovingly detailed they would be called
pornographic if the author had given the same attention to
sex. As usual, King's prose is fast, simple and sloppy. . .
. The climax has the brutish Stark absurdly trying to write
another novel to keep his ectoplasm from sloughing away in
rivulets of goo. Characterization is perfunctory, with an
odd exception:Beaumont's eight-month-old twin babies are
vividly and charmingly described.For King fans this may be
the sort of thing that sustains the myth that 'he writes so
well.'
