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.

The Ax (1997) by Donald Westlake

The Ax (1997) by Donald Westlake: Burke DeVore, a mid-level paper company executive, has been downsized. So he's going to kill his way back to full employment by murdering everyone who stands in the way of his taking a job at another paper company. And he justifies his serial spree by noting that it's not really any different than what the board members of large companies do to their workforce every day.

Westlake's bleak, black satire rings as horrifyingly true today as it did in the late 1990's. Maybe moreso, in this Hell Age of Trump the President. Westlake's novel presents white middle-class rage taken to a (seemingly) logical extreme. 

But The Ax also satirizes that white middle-class sense of privilege while also damning the American obsession with profits for the very few at the expense of everyone else. It's a dynamite novel that shows rather than tells. And it's not for the squeamish. Highly recommended.

The Cutie (1960) by Donald E. Westlake

The Cutie (a.k.a. The Mercenaries) by Donald E. Westlake (1960): Early novel from beloved crime novelist Donald E. Westlake, handsomely re-released in paperback by Hard Case Crime. It's also been given Westlake's preferred title, though the Cutie of the title is not what you'd think from the cover.

Westlake's strengths include a talent for intricate plots, apt bits of metaphoric description, and precise and concise characterization. Even this early in his career, all those strengths are present in The Cutie: you don't need to read this just to be a Westlake completist. You don't even need to care who Westlake is, though you will by the end.

Standalone novels like this one put Westlake firmly in the line of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. The Cutie's first-person narrator, a troubleshooter (pretty much literally) for a mob boss in New York, impresses the reader with his determination to find a killer even as his own almost split personality when it comes to violence becomes more and more apparent. He's not a dead soul, but he's probably damned.

Nonetheless, the narrator's pursuit of a murderer who's made things hot for his mob boss hums with menace and moral rot. And the narrator grows just enough in his own self-assessment that the ending comes as a grim epiphany: the things that the narrator  assumed worked one way may instead work completely differently, at least when you're the boss. 

Verisimilitude makes this sort of street-level thriller work. I don't know how accurate Westlake's depictions of the working of crime in 1960 really are, but they seem real. One of the best bits is a classification of all cops into one of four categories, with the pros and cons of each type. It seems like the sort of thing a killer who's always been too evolved for his econiche might formulate during his downtime. And it's moments like that, among others, that make Westlake worth reading decades after what were supposed to be disposable novels were published. Recommended.