The Dark Half (Signet)
May I borrow this?
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."
--Fiona Webster
| uuid: |
F6821D1B-72F9-4D1D-9C0D-12046108B221 |
| upc: |
9780451167316 |
| title: |
The Dark Half (Signet) |
| purchase date: |
16-05-2005 |
| publisher: |
Signet Book |
| published: |
01-12-1994 |
| price: |
$7.99 |
| pages: |
496 |
| net Rating: |
4.5 |
| last lookup time: |
137982976 |
| genre: |
Movie Tie-Ins
Paperback |
| fullTitle: |
The Dark Half (Signet) |
| currentValue: |
$0.01 |
| created: |
137982944 |
| country: |
us |
| author: |
Stephen King |
| aspect: |
Mass Market Paperback |
| asin: |
0451167317
|
