Written : November 3, 1987 – March 16, 1989

The Dark Half takes place in Castle Rock...

King originally wanted to publish the novel as a collaberation of King and Bachman, but the publishers didn't go for it; readers would have to wait until 1996's dual novels Desperation and The Regulators to read a King/Bachman experiment...

Synopsis :
For years, Thad Beaumont has been writing books under the pseudonym George Stark. When a journalist threatens to expose Beaumont's pen name, the author decides to go public first, killing off his pseudonym. Stark isn't content to be dispatched that easily, though. Beaumont's alter ego comes to life and begins to stalk those responsible for his demise. The police suspect Beaumont is responsible for these violent crimes.

"In The Dark Half I tried to answer the question 'Where do you get your ideas?' It seems to me that for most writers there really is another person hiding inside, although it isn't always dark and it's hardly ever as much as a half. I thought it would be fun to write a story about a novelist whose muse gets totally out of control. There was one problem: I didn't how how to end it. Then, one day while I was on the way to my office, I saw a huge flock of crows-huge enough to darken an appreciable part of the sky-all take wing at once. They made me think of a poem by H.P. Lovecraft called "The Psychopomp," about a bird who is an emissary of death, and a winged messenger between the land inhabited by mortals and that of the afterlife. In that instant, I knew exactly how to dispose of George Stark; all I had to do was go home and write it."

In 1985, 39-year-old Stephen King announced in public that his pseudonymous alter ego, Richard Bachman, was dead. (Never mind that he revived him years later to write The Regulators.) At the beginning of The Dark Half (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.

This is not the first time that Stephen King has written a dark allegory about the fiction writer's situation. As the New York Times writes, "Misery (1987) is a parable in chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his audience, which holds him prisoner and dictates what he writes, on pain of death. The Dark Half is a parable in chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his creative genius, the vampire within him, the part of him that only awakes to raise Cain when he writes, the fratricidal twin who occupies 'the womblike dungeon' of his imagination."