In case you were wondering what happened to this blog, no, Tommyknockers did not force me to abandon this project, although I would have been entirely justified if I had bailed after it. I am not writing a separate post on it, because I feel like the two mini-posts about its terribleness suffice. I do have a bit more to say about it, but then it shall transform into my short-hand for describing SK writing at his worst (or maybe 'killer Coke machines' will be the short-hand..it's already a post label for this blog).
When I first started this project, one of the stated rules about it was that I was not going to set a time frame to finish reading all of SK's novels in chronological order. I am sticking to that rule. So here we are, two and a half years later, and I'm picking it up again. In between, I have moved from Florida to Massachusetts to Maine! So it feels particularly salient to reread all of SK's books as a Maine resident. Don't worry, I live in Portland, which is not close enough to scope out his house on a regular basis or anything weird. But there still are some Maine SK perks, such as a 'Maine' collection at my local library which has a copy of every one of his books.
Anyway, next in the series is The Dark Half, SK's first book after sobering up and a highly (auto-)biographical take on that process. I had read this book as a kid, likely soon after it came out, and mostly what I remembered was that the author's ghost-vampire-zombie (?) twin comes after the author and his family. The author (Thad Beaumont) had recently buried his pseudonym (George Stark) and vowed not to write as him again, which causes the pseudonym to come to life as a terrifying character. This situation mimics one that SK experienced in real life when he was revealed to be Ricahrd Bachmann, although presumably the remainder of this novel is chiefly fiction.
But Stark's supernatural origins go back more deeply than Thad imagines. He did have an actual twin that he 'swallowed' in the womb, and doctors extract actual recognizable human body parts like an eye out of the author's brain when he is a child. These basic plot points are what I remembered from my initial reading. It wasn't a scary book for me, unlike the lasting scars of IT or 'Salem's Lot, and I remember reading it at camp, so it must have been doubly un-scary, what with all of those potentially terrifying woods and such around (why was I reading SK at camp? In hindsight, this seems like it was a very bad idea). But I didn't remember liking it or hating it, or much more about it, to be honest.
So I was very pleasantly surprised when I found that not only is this a good book, it's a very good book, and it definitely shows that Sober SK is vastly superior to Addict SK. One of the most striking aspects of The Dark Half is the fact that the prose is so clear and precise, unlike the flailing passages of Tommyknockers, but also a problem that plagued the vast majority of his novels from The Stand onward. No description feels 'fuzzy.' I will say that I still blame editors for that at least in part, but this novel is so much better in that regard.
Here is my last comment on Tommyknockers (for real this time): in essence, it is a rewriting of IT, although the more realistic version. In both, an alien species comes to Earth and takes over a town. In both, a force rises to fight against the alien's power. With IT, it is The Losers Club, a group of children then adults brought together because they are ostracized from their peers. In Tommyknockers, the job falls to Gard, who takes the alien ship on a suicide mission to stop its harmful influence from spreading any further. Gard is a broken man, an alcoholic whose behavior has cost him his career and strained relationships with those around him. In contrast, while The Losers suffered as children, their lives are seemingly blessed as adults and many of them have achieved great success (except for the Jewish Stan Uris, who committed suicide, and why did you have to go making the Jewish kid the neurotic one, SK? Why???). In fact, this has been one of the major criticisms of IT: that the characters do not speak like people, but like stereotypes; that Bill, the author at the center of The Losers Club, is a self-aggrandized version of a person; and that their fates do not fit their traumatic childhood. Tommyknockers reverses all of this. Instead of being strengthened and blessed by an encounter with aliens, Gard is weakened and killed. That seems more realistic to me, and I wonder if SK's addiction problems are manifesting themselves in this bleak outlook--Gard, of course, is also a writer, but one who has reached a state that renders him incapable of producing good work.
The Dark Half is also a rewriting of one of SK's earlier novels: Misery. In both, an author is held hostage by an outside force and must write a book. Both novels have novels-within-novels: Misery's Return and the latest Alexis Machine book in The Dark Half. However, there is a fundamental difference: in Misery, Annie is Paul Sheldon's muse, even though she is a very dangerous one. She has no qualms about feeding his addiction to pills, keeping him hostage, or even maiming him to ensure that he will finish the work. Misery becomes grim as Paul gets closer to finishing the novel, as it is clear that he is physically close to death too. Even in the epilogue, when he is back in New York and enjoying new-found success as a writer, it's clear that he is permanently damaged, both physically and mentally. There is a question about whether his survival was a triumph, or if he will be able to recover.
On the surface, The Dark Half shows its protagonist as the stronger force against his evil twin. George Stark is less of a muse and more of Mr. Hyde to Thad Beaumont's Dr. Jekyll. Stark's books were violent thrillers and brought some kind of change to Thad's personality when he was writing under this pseudonym, at least from the recollections of his wife. While there are references to earlier alcoholism and smoking (nothing more harmful than that, although one wonders), these are not directly correlated with the Stark novels; however, Stark's blatant disregard for human life and his propensity for smoking and drinking suggests that these behaviors were mirrored by Thad when he was writing these books. Thad is able to overcome his evil twin through a supernatural conceit, although we see that the two men are more alike than he wants to admit. Of course, this plot undoubtedly reflects the concerns that SK must have had at the time as he started his sober life. Not only was he likely worried about how his creative talent would manifest itself in the absence of drugs, this novel reveals how concerned he was about whether his family, specifically his wife, would be capable of forgiveness. There are many scenes in The Dark Half that celebrate the tranquility of the mundane, particularly involving Thad and Liz's twin infants.
There is another major difference between SK's two fictional accounts of writing: the fate of The Dark Half's fictional novel is the opposite of that in Misery. Thad destroys it when he sets fire to his summer house after vanquishing his evil twin. In fact, SK dwells on the destruction of the manuscript, noting that the hand-written pages float into the night sky, then burn up. With this, Stark is gone and Thad goes back to his wife and kids, virtually unscathed. He does not seem broken, he seems whole, and this wholesomeness has allowed him to win the day. It's not hard to see that this ending is partially wishful thinking for the newly-sober SK, who hoped that he would be able to conquer his demons and return to the comfort of domesticity.
[For those of you who are SK superfans and want me to get ahead of myself, I won't. We'll talk about Thad Beaumont's fate in later novels when we get to later novels.]
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