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.'
