The Dark Half

How do you kill something that was never born…Thad Beaumont would like to say he is innocent.He’d like to say he has nothing to do with the series of monstrous murders that keep coming closer to his home.He’d like to say he has nothing to do with the twisted imagination that produced his bestselling novels.He’d like to say he has nothing to do with the voice on the phone uttering its obscene threats and demanding total surrender.But how can Thad disown the ultimate embodiment of evil that goes by the name he gave it—and signs its crimes with Thad’s bloody fingerprints?

Amazon.com Review

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

From Publishers Weekly

The protagonist of King's "top-notch" novel is literary novelist Thad Beaumont, whose greatest success has come with three gory thrillers written under the pseudonym George Stark. Beaumont is threatened by a blackmailer who may reveal Stark's identity; Beaumont kills off Stark instead; and Stark goes on a murderous rampage. "Wondrously frightening . . . among the best of his voluminous work," maintained PW. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review

“A chiller.”

The Flint Journal

“A knockout thriller…brilliant, compelling…grips you by the throat.”

The Palm Beach Post

“Compelling…King makes you believe.”

The Baton Rouge Advocate

“King is just so good, the pages turn and you’re snared by his web.”

About the Author

Stephen King lives in Maine and Florida with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. He has written more than forty books and two hundred short stories. He has won the World Fantasy Award, several Bram Stoker awards, and the O. Henry Award for his story “The Man in the Black Suit,” and is the 2003 recipient of The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

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