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The Dark HalfStephen King wrote several stories under a pseudonymn, Richard Bachman, during the seventies. They were moderate to lukewarm sellers. An obscure bookstore clerk did some digging and found King and Bachman were one and the same. When pressed, King admitted the ruse. Ten years or so down the line King incorporated the idea of a writer using a fake name and being nosed out in a novel called The Dark Half. It's the story of Thad Beaumont, who lives in the tiny Maine town of Ludlow (the setting of Pet Sematary and about an hour away from perennial King whipping-boy Castle Rock). His "other" is George Stark, who writes gritty crime novels about a violent killer named Alexis Machine, which do very well. When it's learned that Thad Beaumont, who writes cerebral literary fiction that is as different from Stark as day from night, is really Stark, he and his wife Elizabeth scheme up a photo opportunity: a daylight burial of George. His epitaph at the local cemetery says it all: NOT A VERY NICE GUY. Stark proves a restless corpse, and over the weeks to come he resurrects himself from his mock-grave and kills, gruesomely, everyone he perceives responsible for his "death". Thad, meanwhile, is plagued by surreal nightmares, and is soon visited by Alan Pangborn (who replaced George Bannerman after his sudden demise in Cujo and four years later is featured prominently in Needful Things), asking questions Thad can't--and doesn't wish to--answer. Thad experiences blackouts and wakes to find that he and George share a telepathic bond--scribbled notes by George appear in Thad's hand, using Stark's favorite pencils. The notes tell Thad what George has been up to. Observing his son and daughter, Thad notes that twins share a unique bond: they feel another's pain; each seems to read the other's mind. This may shed some light on how he can see George's murderous rampages, and how the two can telegraph pain to one another upon their own bodies like some Morseian nightmare. Pangborn learns the truth about Beaumont: he was twins. The unborn brother was absorbed into Tad in utero and later removed from his skull when the author was a boy. He had suffered from severe headaches, and it was originally thought to be a tumor causing them. The shock of seeing an eye in the growth, and of the clinic being besieged by an unusual number of sparrows on the day of the operation, quite unnerved the attending physicians and the hospital staff. Now the sheriff wonders: what is Stark? An angry ghost? Or Tad manifesting a multiple personality? Whichever he is, George Stark's time is to the bone. He's rotting away. He's furious. He's desperate. He needs Thad's help to write a new Alexis Machine novel...and will get his way at any cost. And the sparrows are flying. Dark Half, The
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