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Serious
writer or serial killer? George is in two minds.
Synopsis
Thaddeus Beaumont is the writer in
question. At age 11 he writes his first story. Around the same time he
begins to get excruciating headaches, which culminate in a convulsion.
Surgery reveals something startling - first an eye, then other small
fragments of an incompletely absorbed twin that's lodged in his brain.
This sort of ''in utero cannibalism,'' according to his doctor, is not
unusual, although rarely is anything left undigested, as it is in Thad
Beaumont's case.
The operation is
a success, and Thad grows up to be a mild-mannered professor of creative
writing, a doting husband and the father of twins, a modestly successful
writer of novels with titles like ''Purple Haze.'' But under the pen name
of George Stark he is the best-selling author of ferocious thrillers like
''Sharkmeat Pie,'' the protagonist of which is named Alexis Machine
because he kills like one.
Circumstances force Thad to own up to his pseudonym, which in any
case has become irksome. He has decided to go it on his own, to lay his
fictional self to rest. He and his wife even hold a mock burial service
for George Stark, papier-mache tombstone and all. But one morning a
man-sized cavity is discovered at the site. Footprints lead away. Very
soon, people begin to die horribly, in particular everybody associated
with Thad's decision to bury George Stark, whose prose style governs the
graphic and gruesome descriptions of the murders. For George Stark has
materialized. As Stark himself puts it, ''The word became flesh, you might
say.''
But George Stark is not
content to be merely undead. He wants to be alive entirely. He wants Thad
to begin another novel under Stark's name. In fact, he wants to
collaborate with Thad, to learn how to write, to become independent.
Unless Thad complies, Stark will truly fade out of existence, for his
flesh has begun to rot, decay, stink and ooze fluids, although no outside
force seems capable of destroying him. Thad is forced to comply, for Stark
has taken his wife and children hostage. As the collaboration gets going,
Stark begins to heal; Thad develops running sores.
On the whole, Mr. King is tactful in teasing out the
implications of his parable - never mind an author's note that
acknowledges a debt to ''the late Richard Bachman,'' Mr. King's own
pseudonym, without whom ''this novel could not have been written.'' 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, a Dracula arisen to
prey on the whole man and his family. Nor does anyone in the novel say
outright that reality inevitably leaks fiction, which then floods reality,
that reality and fiction feed on and feed each other, that they are at war
yet they are twins - so identical that attempts to say which is which only
lead to more fictions. Such things are better 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 (the F.B.I. is ''the Effa Bee
Eye,'' marijuana is ''wacky tobaccy''). At the end, the decent family man
wins out, but at a cost - which is how it should be. Most readers, I
believe, will want decency and reality 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. -- George Stade,
New York Times
Quotes from the
Book
"You're
dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie
down." |
