The Dark Half by Stephen King

First published: 1989

Type of plot: Horror

Time of work: 1960-1989

Locale: New Jersey and Maine

Principal Characters:

• Thad Beaumont, a novelist and English professor
• George Stark, Thad’s pseudonymous alter ego
• Elizabeth (“Liz”) Beaumont, Thad’s wife
• Sheriff Alan Pangborn, Castle Rock’s sheriff and Thad’s ally
• Dr. Hugh Pritchard, a physician who performed Thad’s strange operation
• Frederick Clawson, Thad’s former literary agent
• Rick Cowley, Thad’s literary agent
• Homer Gamache, the first murder victim
• Rawlie DeLesseps, one of Thad’s colleagues

The Novel

Following fifteen previous Stephen King horror novels, including the immensely popular Carrie (1974), ’Salem’s Lot (1975), and The Shining (1977), The Dark Half exploits fictions within fiction and paranormal phenomena that mystify and terrorize a cast of plausible characters.

Thad Beaumont, the protagonist, has been a successful novelist whose most popular works were written under the pseudonym “George Stark.” Writing as Stark, Beaumont created a fearsome embodiment of evil, a ruthless, robotlike killer named Alexis Machine. The gruesome fictional horrors perpetrated by Machine were responsible for Beaumont/Stark’s sales and literary notoriety.

Trouble begins, however, when Beaumont determines to abandon his Stark pseudonym and decides to write serious works under his own name. From the moment of this decision, he is incapacitated by writer’s block. He even suspects that he can write successfully only as Stark. Meanwhile, Beaumont’s former agent, the sleazy Frederick Clawson, reveals to People magazine that Stark is Beaumont, a fact that Beaumont acknowledges in an interview that culminates in the mock burial of George Stark and Beaumont’s confirmation that Stark’s career has terminated. A fiction or not, Stark refuses to stay buried in his mock grave. Ghoul-like, he emerges and launches a campaign of terror and grisly murders among Beaumont’s associates and loved ones. The objective of his brutal rampage is to force Beaumont formally to resurrect him and to recommence writing, this time under Stark’s direction. Confused, menaced, and terrorized by a Stark who may or may not be a monster of his own creation, Beaumont is plunged into a seemingly endless nightmare as he tries to gain credibility with his wife, his friends, and the sheriff and to cope with and then subdue Stark.

Mystery, suspense, and plausibility are lent to this scenario by King’s recital in The Dark Half’s prologue of a critical event in Thad Beaumont’s childhood. Troubled by the sound and vision of birds and wracked by headaches, the precocious Thad undergoes surgery for removal of a brain tumor. Within Thad’s brain, the surgeon discovers, and removes, living portions of Thad’s twin, who had been cannibalized by Thad when the two were fetuses.

King paces his plot through three parts that together encompass twenty-six chapters plus an epilogue. Following the essential information about Beaumont’s childhood operation in the prologue, part 1 convincingly sketches Thad’s domestic situation in Castle Rock, Maine, and introduces the major characters. The consequences of Thad’s writing block and his People interview, the mock burial of George Stark, the emergence of something from Stark’s “grave,” and Castle Rock’s grisly murders (the first victim, Homer Gamache, is beaten to death with his own prosthetic arm), open the mystery and raise questions that beguile the reader throughout the book. Is George Stark real? Is the whole story a dream? Is Thad schizophrenic, paranormal, or simply mentally unbalanced? On what grounds can credibility be lent to Thad’s suspicions or to George Stark’s “return”? What is Stark’s game?

In part 2, Stark takes charge of events, conducting a series of calculatedly horrific murders the purpose of which is to terrorize Thad into writing once more as Stark. At the same time, Thad wrestles with doubts about his own stability; he also tries to retain his wife’s understanding and win Sheriff Pangborn as an ally. Part 2 closes with the relentless Stark closing in on Thad by abducting his wife and twins.

In part 3, the tables turn against Stark. Without fully comprehending the paranormal events associated with this monster, Sheriff Pangborn nevertheless competently and wholeheartedly joins Thad in efforts to thwart Stark. Events climax with Stark, his hostages, Thad, and the sheriff testing wits in the Beaumont household. Stark’s defeat and the Beaumonts’ liberation come by means of increasingly ubiquitous sparrows, King’s “psychopomps” (those who conduct the living to the dead), which blanket the landscape and then whirl the dying Stark into space and oblivion. As a finale, Sheriff Pangborn and Thad ignite Stark’s automobile and then crash it into the Beaumont house, destroying the home so that the whole bizarre tale can be obscured by a mundane house fire and thus be rendered comprehensible to Castle Rock’s natives.

King’s characters gain dimension through both words and actions, but with the exception of Stark, they achieve three-dimensionality only briefly. Thad is thus convincing when confronting his authorial problems or rather cynically exploiting his People interview. Stark is effective and believable, but only as a symbol. Rawlie DeLesseps, Thad’s English department colleague, though a relatively minor figure in moving the action, comes through successfully because of his quirky professorial manner. Dr. Pritchard speaks and behaves like a believable surgeon. Stark’s victims—and they are numerous—react plausibly during their last moments of terror. Like Thad’s detestable literary agent Frederick Clawson, however, most of the victims were no great bargains for civilization in the first place.

The Characters

King is accomplished in the production of credible characters in familiar domestic and small-town settings. One of the hallmarks of his composition is his ability to draw readers into the normal routines and trials of middle American households. These familiar settings are essential backdrops against which the author then casts grotesque and fantastic events. As King’s protagonist, Thad Beaumont evokes sympathy from the outset. His struggle with writer’s block is almost a cliché. Readers wonder whether Beaumont has created and fallen victim to his literary alter ego, George Stark, a Frankenstein. Thad, though, is neither mad nor hallucinating. He is a good and decent man who unintentionally opens the door to evil, an evil that springs from his own creativity and actions, an evil that victimizes him, his family, and his acquaintances and that therefore must be fought.

Liz Beaumont, Thad’s wife, is a somewhat passive, two-dimensional loving soul. She is worried about her husband, but until the latter stages of the book, she is uncomprehending about Thad’s personal struggle with Stark. She manifests some resolve and initiative when Stark takes her and her twins hostage, but she functions chiefly as a gauge of the normal.

As Thad becomes ensnared in the irrationalities that surround Stark’s reality, Sheriff Alan Pangborn serves as the rational counterfoil to Thad’s suspicions about who and what Stark is. Pangborn is the reader’s solid if unimaginative alter ego. He is at first mystified and professionally skeptical about Thad, suspecting his innocence, his explanations, and his emotional stability. Eventually, however, he becomes Thad’s essential ally.

George Stark is the embodiment of evil, and he has most of the literary accoutrements required to make him appear diabolical. He is calculating, cold-blooded, ruthless, and maniacal. In his supposed reality, he hails from Oxford, Mississippi, and he is replete with a hokey Southern charm and menacing redneck speech. Inevitably, he is more interesting than the Thad Beaumont who ostensibly created him, and he provides the drama that gives life to The Dark Half. Stark’s own authorial creation, Alexis Machine, lives up to his name as a vicious killer from whom Stark borrows words and symbols of his evil as well as the techniques that he employs in his slaughterings.

Stark’s numerous murder victims are convincing in their last moments of confusion and terror; however, they tend to be either rather stupid innocents or, like the agent Clawson, unpleasant. King’s characters nevertheless always maintain enough substance to rush his story along.

Critical Context

Since the mid-1970’s, Stephen King has ranked among the most popular of American authors. Many academic and literary critics likewise rank him among the country’s best writers. His readership reaches into the tens of millions, and he has fed its appetites with new books (as well as their film versions, articles, and written conversations) almost every year. His canon ranges far more widely than can be inferred from The Dark Half, encompassing science fiction, elements of legends, myths, tragedy, the political and historical, and every imaginable aspect of the gothic, macabre, and horror genres. His capacity to mine and recast materials from all these areas attests an assiduously acquired mastery as well as to his unique perceptiveness and immense enthusiasm for his work. His genius for fascinating and drawing in his readers is palpable. A self-described “guru of the ordinary,” he beguiles with replications of commonplace dialogue, feelings, sights, and experiences, the better to stretch imaginations, to shock, or to horrify.

Critics note that The Dark Half, with its play upon pseudonymous authors—King and his earlier pseudonymous self, Richard Bachman, whose “death” King cites in the author’s note, and Beaumont and George Stark—represents the liberation (and improvement) of King’s writing. As Bachman, King struggled to get things out of his system, wrestled with himself, and experimented. Creatively, Bachman may have made King possible, and in that sense The Dark Half may be interpreted as autobiographical. Perhaps King’s anxieties make possible his rapport with an anxiety-ridden American culture that nurtures self-destruction.

Bibliography

Beahm, George. Stephen King: America’s Best-Loved Bogeyman. Kansas City, Mo.: Andréws and McMeel, 1998. Beahm provides an intriguing glimpse into Stephen King’s life as a celebrity and publishing phenomenon. An excellent resource that helps readers gain deeper insight into King’s works.

Duamant, Tasha. Review of The Dark Half, by Stephen King. Maclean’s 102 (December 18, 1989): 57. Although Duamant believes that King “has created an absorbing story with his regular-guy prose and familiar, all-American settings,” she finds that the novel sometimes lacks the suspense for which King is known.

Hohne, Karen A. “The Power of the Spoken Word in the Works of Stephen King.” Journal of Popular Culture 28 (Fall, 1994): 93-103. A defense of King’s work against the “snobbery of scholars who look down upon the rustic tradition of popular language.” Although Hohne does not deal specifically with The Dark Half, she gives a solid overview of King’s work and calls for academia to recognize “its potential to mobilize mass support.”

Magistrale, Tony. The Moral Voyages of Stephen King. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1989. A clear, substantive analysis of King’s continuing interest in interactions of good and evil. The author also deals with other recurrent themes in King’s novels: the individual search for identity, self-destructiveness, social decay, and psychological imbalances.

Magistrale, Tony. Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half. New York: Twayne, 1992. This is jargon-free scholarship written for an intelligent popular audience. Critical, but very appreciative of King as a major writer. Views King as a trenchant commentator on an America that sees tawdry weaknesses and menace in the American Dream. Opens with an informative King interview. Cross-analyzes thirteen King novels. Useful chronology and maps of settings.

The New York Times. October 23, 1989, p. B1(N).

The New York Times Book Review. XCIV, October 29, 1989, p.12.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXVI, September 1, 1989, p.76.

Russell, Sharon. Stephen King: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Offers a brief biography of King as well as an overall view of his fiction. Entire chapters are devoted to each of his major novels, including one on The Dark Half. Discussion includes plot and character development, thematic issues, and a new critical approach to the novel.

Time. CXXXIV, November 20, 1989, p.105.