The Dark Half (1989)

It’s not a tumour!

The razor blade goes snicker-snack.

“I’m back…I’m back from the dead and you don’t seem glad to see me at all, you ungrateful son of a bitch.“

Stephen King (writing as Thaddeus Beaumont, writing as George Stark, writing Riding to Babylon) in The Dark Half

If The Tommyknockers was King’s wake-up call to get sober, The Dark Half is his novel way of saying goodbye, so long, and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Over the last few books, King has been struggling to deal with the effects of his alcoholism and drug abuse, something that had driven him to produce some of his very best work as well as some of his worst. Though we cannot know exactly the road to recovery King took, this book feels like a personal exorcism of King’s past. Yet despite how much is clearly cribbed from King’s own life leading up until this point, it doesn’t feel as personal a story as something like It or The Shining feels, in part due to it being an act of purging his demons as best he can for his own personal catharsis rather than his readers’. After all, an alcoholic has to confront their personal demons every day.

First, the historical context that leads us to The Dark Half. As mentioned many times throughout the course of this series, King published five books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, the first four of which had been collected in a single volume; the fifth book, Thinner, was the one that got him found out, as detailed here. Richard Bachman books tend to skew darker that the mainline books, allowing King to have a bit more fun melting his characters that he would otherwise, as well as a place to put work he still thought was good out into the world. But he still had those darker storytelling urges (Misery was intended as a Bachman book), and losing that avenue of expression probably stung a little bit.

Despite losing that, King took the news at the time well (I suspect probably relieved that he could be himself), but the idea of Richard Bachman not necessarily wanting to die from ‘cancer of the pseudonym,’ got the gears turning in this writer’s mind, and the five year rest he had initially announced after the publication of The Tommyknockers became more like 18 months. But why, after a man who seemingly can’t help but write, would he announce a five year gap anyway?

Well, that’s because of the second event that happened shortly after the publication of his last book. From best as I can gather, it was after the publication of The Tommyknockers that Tabitha and the rest of the King family and friends staged an intervention for Stephen. It was during this time that he finally began to get sober, and so the period from when he finished The Tommyknockers until he started writing The Dark Half is, for King at least, quite a slow period (1988 only saw four short stories published, most of which are later collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes). Having known a few addicts in my time, and seen the best and worst of what happens, I can’t imagine this was a settled time for King, having to wrestle with those dark urges that he knew could kill him.

Rather ingeniously, King combines the ideas of a vengeful Richard Bachman (here named George Stark) out for revenge with the therapeutic practice of writing about his addiction to create one of King’s sharpest thrillers in The Dark Half.

In some ways, this forms nice trilogy of addiction novels alongside Misery and The Tommyknockers, if not in the sense of quality at least in the exploration of the theme of addiction. And though this book is great, it can easily be described as a therapy writing exercise for King. It allows him, in a safe way, to explore that ‘what if?’ scenario, Not about his pseudonymous tulpa back from the dead, but what would happen if he wasn’t able to conquer his addictions? What scares Liz Beaumont most isn’t just George Stark, but how much of her husband she sees in him. George Stark isn’t a separate being to Thad Beaumont, but a facet of the whole. Though the novel ostensibly ends with bad guy defeated (in a deliciously gory and over the top way – bet King had a ball writing that), evil is not fully defeated, nor can it be. It’s there, that dark half of Thad Beaumont, still waiting somewhere. The real fear for King expressed here is what would happen if Tabitha left? Unlike other books, where I think King is exploring these ideas subconsciously, here it is deliberate, inspired by what was happening to him at the time.

The book is way for him work out those fears, as well as help him along the route to recovery, reminding him of what is important. There’s a moment late in the book where Sheriff Pangborn is feeding one of the Beaumont twins, and it is described in such acute detail that King is clearly recalling fond experiences with his own children, but in the face of the monstrous Stark/addictions. The book itself is constantly playing the duality of his dark half that King is struggling with and understands all too well. The book at one point has Beaumont muse on the idea:

It wasn’t exactly lying; it wasn’t even embroidering the truth, strictly speaking. It was almost the unconscious art of fictionalising one’s own life, and Thad didn’t know a single writer of novels or short stories who didn’t do it.

It makes explicit everything King wants to achieve in this novel, and makes it clear for his readers too. Through the power of his own fiction, King was able to, at the very least partially, process and begin his own recovery. Much like Misery or The Tommyknockers aren’t subtle, it is clear what King was dealing with.

But as King is discussing his addictions metaphorically, there is still a little bit of wiggle room for interpretation of the book’s allegorical play. And as King is discussing his own dark half, a part of himself he would like to deny existed but perhaps secretly likes, there is inevitably a queer reading of this, one that isn’t too much of a stretch to get. Thad struggles to come to terms with his inner darkness (read: queerness), and indulges on the side in this dangerous, other identity. But the truth will out, and George will make himself known. And once Liz knows about it, the family unit can never go back to how it was before Thad’s dark half is forced out in the open. Even the slow rotting of George Stark, at least initially, reads like an over-the-top fear of AIDS or other sexual transmitted diseases rotting away, especially with the sores that appear on Stark’s face like herpes. I doubt King intended this, but but the relationship between Beaumont and Stark can easily be read as the duality of closeted queerness.

Similarly, King is also dealing with ideas of toxic masculinity, especially interesting considering King will soon be writing a number of books that decidedly focus on a female voice rather than male. George Stark is everything wrong and extreme about a certain type of masculinity. I always imagined Richard Bachman being Stephen King in a leather jacket, and when I first wrote about that I had no idea that’s basically who George Stark is, making King’s fears about himself even clearer. King has never written about this type of masculinity in glowing terms before (see: Rage, Thinner), but perhaps never with as much venom as he had before. Yes, there is a Bachman-like glee in the many deaths throughout the book, but there is a detached coolness in those early stages of the book that, at least in my opinion, made for a less engaging read. King writes about addiction much more candidly in earlier and later books, but the process rather than the product is more personal for King. It reads almost like King actually writing as Bachman to exorcise him, but over the course of the book the warmth we come to expect from Stevie comes shining through again and we thrilled to reach that ending. But not for a moment are we allowed to forget the darkness that inhabits Thad Beaumont. The ending is a pyrrhic victory, reminding the audience that underneath the win against evil, the possibility still rests within the hearts of otherwise great men for great evil. And sometimes, we have to learn to live that possibility. That’s what addiction is.

The 80s had been a decade of great success for King, more than most authors will ever know. But in a personal capacity, King has struggled. Though it is not fair to know all the details of King’s life from this point, his success, rabid fanbase, drug abuse, alcoholism, and Maximum Overdrive must have put a tremendous strain on the lives of him and his family. King processes personal difficulties in his writing, and in its way it was books like this, Misery and even The Tommyknockers that saved King’s life. The Dark Half allowed him to explore his darker self, but in reality King was about to begin a new, phase of his career – one clean from drugs. I doubt it was ever easy for him. I doubt it is ever easy. But for his family’s sake at the very least, I am glad he was able to conquer his own dark half.

Observations and Connections

For those interested, the full list of George Stark novels (in the unlikely event another character in another book is reading them): Machine’s Way, Oxford Blues, Riding to Babylon, Sharkmeat Pie and Steel Machine. Thad Beaumont’s three books are The Golden Dog, Purple Haze and The Sudden Dancers.

Two King locations crop up again – the ever-present Castle Rock, which first appeared in The Dead Zone but has cropped up again and again throughout King’s bibliography, including references in Cujo (where it is set), The Stand, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, and The Body amongst many others. The other Maine location is Ludlow, which first appeared in Pet Sematary. There is a mention of an Orinoco truck passing through the area, the same type of truck that appeared memorably in that book. Juniper Hill, the asylum that first appeared in It is also mentioned. Castle Rock finally gets a new sheriff after Bannerman’s death in Cujo in Alan Pangborn, whom I doubt we have seen the last of.

Aside from that, there aren’t many explicit King references, but there is some fun speculation to be had. King’s previous book had a meta reference to himself as the unnamed author who lived in Maine and wrote books about all those monsters. Could this be retconned to instead be Thad Beaumont as George Stark? It is tempting to do so, only fudging the details slightly for the fit.

Thad works at the university, and I can’t imagine that Maine is bursting with universities. Is it possible it’s the same one from Pet Sematary? Ludlow and Castle Rock are within driving distance, so it could be possible but there is nothing to confirm either way.

Another moment of speculation. Liz Beaumont is pushed down the stairs in 1973 in Boston. I’m not up up on my American geography, but Boston isn’t exactly too far from New York where another well-known pusher character operated at this time, namely Jack Mort. We’re never told who did push Liz, so maybe it was Mort who did it?

Despite the importance of twins, I found it surprising there is no reference made to the idea of twinners from The Talisman. I’m sure there are fan theories out there connecting the ideas, especially with Thad Beaumont’s abilities to seemingly shape reality by creating the tulpa of George Stark in the first place. There is also a passage that feels very Dark Tower, at least to me: “The one who exists in the normal world . . . and the one creates worlds. They are two. Always at least two.“

Outside of King’s own universe of connections, a minor character who appears in the prologue is named Dr Seward, a reference to the same-named character from Dracula.

UP NEXT: We’re staying up until late for Four Past Midnight.