Jesse’s Reviews > The Dark Half > Status Update

I’m pretty sure Alan lives through this but IM NOT SURE

Given where Stark is right now, we have 150 pages left. It’s gonna be a pretty harrowing 150 pages 😬

King writes a lot here about the special connection between twins because of William and Wendy but more importantly, probably, the fact that Stark is a manifestation of the twin that was subsumed while a fetus and which had started to grow when Thad was 10-11. Maybe we’ll get to the why. I’m still wondering if we’ll find out that Stark-Thad was responsible for Liz’s miscarriage.

Wish I could say a lot more. There is a lot of true crime sort of investigative evidence with the phone recording and the voice prints as we are caught in a sort of The Exorcist scenario where George Stark is considered an impossibility in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary. I don’t remember Alan from previous novels — but I know that he features in Needful Things.

Given that Thad wrote violent crime stories as George Stark and his dark twin is essentially a violent, homicidal manic on a warpath of revenge, it seems that King is having his fun writing a crime story while making enough of it supernatural intrigue to fit within his wheelhouse. He made some overt references to Agatha Christie but placing those as crime stories seems like it’s missing the point.

You know what? Good on King. Thad’s wife has to drag it out of him but he tells her about the stuff that leads her to know that it isn’t just a crazed fan. Maybe I’m just used to the artificial drama of some novels but this was pretty refreshing.

There are now several aspects of horror at play. Right now King is examining your shadow self arising as a separate being, but what kind of terror happens when you are framed for murder with typically incontrovertible proof? I think that’s part of the as of now only hinted at horror with Homer’s death. He picked George up because he is the spitting image of Thaddeus.

The home aspect with Wendy and William as twin infants is as sweet as can be. I realize now that we are DEEP in a glut of King protagonists who are authors, and this is perhaps the most self-referential yet, marrying his time publishing as Richard Bachman to his uncomfortable awareness of his temper as originally explored in The Shining. King doesn’t hesitate to jump in with this one, either.