| The Dark Half (1989) |
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| Character List: Thad Beaumont Liz Beaumont George Stark Alan Pangborn At the start of The Dark Half in 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. |