The Dark Half (1989) by Stephen King

The Dark Half (1989) by Stephen King: The Dark Half falls into the transition zone between drug and alcohol abuse and sobriety for Stephen King, whose loved ones staged an intervention some time during the novel's initial composition. And among other things, the novel features a novelist who has struggled with alcohol addiction. 

Protagonist Thad Beaumont also struggles with his best-selling pseudonym having been 'outed' -- or forced into an outing, really, in order to deprive the discoverer of a writer's 'dark half' of any financial windfall after that discoverer tried to blackmail Beaumont. King's own pen-name, Richard Bachman, died of "cancer of the pseudonym" in 1986 under less blackmaily circumstances.

Beaumont himself writes (or, writer's blocked, wrote) mainstream literary fiction, with his first novel almost winning a major prize. His 'own' novels have never sold that well. Writer's block caused him to start writing violent, hard-boiled crime fiction as 'George Stark.' 'Stark' nods to the prolific Donald Westlake's 'Richard Stark' pen-name, if you're interested. 

The protagonist of two of these best-selling novels, Alexis Machine, also nods to a character in a novel by crime writer Shane Stevens, as King notes in his afterword.

Man, that's a lot of nods! One last one would be that Beaumont's name seems to be a gesture towards the prolific fantasy and horror writer Charles Beaumont, with 'Beaumont' itself having been a career-long pen-name for Charles Nutt.

So Beaumont retires George Stark -- in a feature article in People magazine no less! Thad's wife feels relief at this. She never liked the way Thad acted when he was writing as Stark, almost as if he were another person.

Well, yes -- George Stark does indeed turn out to be a different person. Or a different something, anyway. And he's really pissed at having been 'retired.' And he looks and acts a lot like Alexis Machine, the violent and amoral criminal protagonist of two of the Stark novels.

The Dark Half entertainingly wrestles with a surprising number of meta-fictional issues amidst its mostly propulsive plot. King structures the novel in an interesting way. It's what I guess I'll call the 'Two Steps Forward, One Step Back' Structure. 

Stanley Kubrick famously used this structure in The Killing because that's the structure the novel that was the basis for The Killing used. The plot follows one character for awhile until some sort of crisis is reached. Then it jumps back in time to a different character and proceeds forward until the crisis has been reached and passed for another crisis. Then, rinse and repeat. The studio found this structure confusing and forced an infamous voice-over onto The Killing. Here, it mostly works.

Recurring King character Sheriff Alan Pangborn appears here because some of The Dark Half occurs in Pangborn's Castle Rock. Pangborn would soon be the protagonist of Needful Things (1991) and, in an alternate-universe version, a character played by Scott Glenn in the first season of Castle Rock. Here, he's introduced to the weirdness of Castle Rock for the first time (Pangborn hails from New Jersey) but certainly not the last.

In all, The Dark Half is enjoyable, occasionally piercing, and only sometimes a bit padded, especially with lengthy, narrative-halting  biographies of peripheral characters, a recurring problem in King. King would re-use some elements of The Dark Half decades later in The Outsider. 

Somewhat bizarrely, King also gives an academic friend of Beaumont's some traits previously given to a character in "The Crate" (adapted in Creepshow). I have no idea if this was intentional or if King forgot that he'd used elements such as a wife/significant other who annoyingly tells people "Just call me Billie!" 

King does manage the feat of making the common sparrow into a magical figure of hope and dread. You wouldn't think sparrows could conjure up the Sublime, but The Dark Half somehow pulls that trick off. 

Recommended.