'The Dark Half,'' is a considerable comeback from the mechanical silliness of his previous one, ''The Tommyknockers,'' which was possibly his worst. One key to what makes ''The Dark Half'' work is that it combines what was successful in two of King's earlier books the threat that the dead world posed to the living in ''Pet Sematary,'' along with the problems of being a successful writer that were so bloodily exploited in ''Misery.'' This mix may sound grotesquely contrived to readers familiar with those books: something like Dr. Faustus meeting the fat lady with the hatchet. And, in fact, "The Dark Half" does have its problems getting out of the ground, so to speak. We learn first that Thaddeus Beaumont got good news and bad news when he was an 11-year-old. He discovered his talent as a writer. But he also started having violent headaches Thaddeus Beaumont is the writer in question. This culminates in a convulsion. Surgery reveals
something startling - first an eye, then other small fragments of an incompletely absorbed twin that's lodged in his brain. This sort of "in utero cannibalism," according to his doctor, is not unusual, although rarely is anything left undigested, as it is in Thad Beaumont's case. The X-ray led to brain surgery and the removal from his prefrontal lobe of - gasp! - "a single blind and malformed human eye" and "part of a nostril, three fingernails and two teeth.''
Flash forward now 28 years to Thad Beaumont as a 39-year-old, reading a story in People magazine. It is 1988; Thad has an attractive wife, a baby son and daughter who are twins, and a mixed career as a writer - mixed because while Thad has shown promise as a literary writer, he has achieved best-sellerdom as a writer of violent crime novels under the pen name George Stark. The story in People reports that Thad has decided to "kill" George Stark. An accompanying photograph even shows Thad and his wife shaking hands over George Stark's gravestone, whose epitaph reads: GEORGE STARK 1975-1988 Not a Very Nice Guy. That night, Thad has a nasty nightmare about a tour of the underworld he is taken on by George Stark. The next day, the head groundskeeper of Homeland Cemetery in Castle Rock, where the People photographer posed the mock burial of Stark, discovers a large hole in the turf surrounded by fingermarks and footsteps. A few hours later, a local man is found dead beside a nearby road. He was apparently beaten to death with his own prosthetic arm. Now, that hole in the cemetery's turf is almost as big as the one in the plot logic of "The Dark Half." Both King and Thad Beaumont have a lot of explaining to do when whatever crawled out of the graveyard goes on a razor-wielding rampage, leaving fingerprints identical to Thad's, yet insisting when Thad and the police finally confront it, that it is none other than the writer George Stark. The hard work of explaining the plot's logic may account for why ''The Dark Half'' is unusually talky and cerebral for a thriller by Stephen King. It turns out that what George Stark really
wants is for Thad to continue using him as a pen name to keep his body from decomposing. Not insignificantly, the novel is crammed with playful hommages to other writer (George Stark's home town is Oxford, Missisippi), including an author's note in which King declares: "I'm indebted to the late Richard Bachman for his help and inspiration. This novel could not have been written without him." Richard Bachman, of course, is the pen name under which King wrote five of his novels.
Regardless of the novel's logic, we are swept along by the sheer vitality of the narrative voice. And eventually the logic does lock into place, and we finally begin to believe in George Stark as "the word become flesh, you might say." At about this point in "The Dark Half," Mr. King shifts over from the Down East vernacular that enlivens much of his prose to the poetic image that animates his powerful conclusion, one of the most effective he has
yet written.