Title: The Dark Half
Author: Stephen King
File Type: Mobi
Subject:Horror
Description:
A knockout thriller...brilliant, compelling...grips you by the throat. (Flint Journal)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 didnt 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 heroalter ego is an evil character named Alexis Machine.
Thad Beaumonts pseudonym is not so docile as Stephen Kings, 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 Beaumonts 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 writers situation. As the New York Times writes, Misery (1987) is a parable in chiller form of the popular writers 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 writers 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