The Dark Half: We Are Back Like George Stark Crawling Out Of A Grave

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.]

Horrible writing from 'The Tommyknockers,' Part 2

This book needs to be over.  It is SO BAD.  There are less than a hundred pages left and I keep trying to sit down and finish it, but then it gets too bad.  I don't want to give away just how bad, but I will let these two examples speak for themselves:

One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred-pound Coke machine, one need worry about nothing else.  There was a thudding, crunching sound.  The front of Leandro's skull shattered like a Ming vase hurled onto the floor.  A split second later his spine snapped.  For a moment the machine carried him along, plastered to it like a very large bug plastered to the windshield of a fast-moving car.  His splayed legs dragged on the road, the white line unreeling between them.  The heels of his loafers eroded to smoking rubber nodules.  One fell off.

 If your question is, 'Did a character just get attacked by a giant, moving Coke machine?', then the answer is, 'Yes, this novel is, in fact, that bad.'  Also, the similes.  The terrible, terrible similes.  They fall like a Ming vase hurled onto the floor.

One more, which comes from a scene where Bobbi is describing the nature of the aliens who are possessing the town:

We're builders, not understanders.

If you're curious, SK uses the not-a-word 'understanders' more than once.  I mean, I am all for blaming his addled state for this catastrophe, but I also have to ask, where were his editors?

Horrible writing from 'Tommyknockers,' Part 1

I have a feeling this will be a multi-post topic.

I have started The Tommyknockers.  It is as bad as I remember.  Actually, I don't remember much about it, so it must be super bad.  And it is.  For instance, one of the characters is constantly referenced by her last name.  Think it over.  It's weird.  It feels wrong.  It feels lazy.  Ugh.

Anyway, I figured that at least if I can revel in the terrible writing, it might make it slightly more fun.  So here is the best passage I have found so far:

When he got drunk, his heart got hot.  The nukes.  The goddam nukes.  It was symbolic, yeah, okay, you didn't really have to be Freud to figure out that what he was really protesting was the reactor in his own heart.  When it came to matters of restraint, James Gardener had a bad containment system.  There was some technician inside who should have long since been fired.  He sat and played with all the wrong switches.  That guy wouldn't be really happy until Jim Gardener went China Syndrome.

I just........yeah.  Possibly the lengthiest and worst metaphor in SK's oeuvre, although I have a feeling that there are still more gems to come.

One more thing on Misery

What struck me on this reread as well is that Misery works in a similar way to The Eyes of the Dragon and 'Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.'  In all three, someone is imprisoned and needs to escape through an elaborate plot.  All three also rank among the stories that I feel are the best in SK's work.  Coincidence?

Misery (aka On Writing, Version 1.0)

[I told you that would be fast....here we are, just over 24 hours later, and Misery is done]

I know that I start to sound a bit like a broken record on this blog when I go on about how you don't actually need a terrifying alien clown or a bunch of vampires invading a town or a violent writer going crazy in a hotel or whatever in most of Stephen King's horror books to create the horror.  But bear with me a minute when I say that you don't actually need Annie Wilkes for Misery.  Because I know that this sounds absolutely absurd from one perspective (how else would you wind up with the basic scenario?), but from another perspective, it makes complete sense to me.  Sure, she is a psychopath with severe mental health issues and a penchant for the grotesque.  But she is also Paul's muse, albeit something of a practical version of one.  She is an editor and a facilitator for the creative process.  She offers advice that might seem to stem from her naivete.  However, as Paul starts to think over the advice that she has provided, he realizes that she is right: perhaps Fast Cars was not such a great project, perhaps his first draft of Misery's Return was not convincing, perhaps Annie (and therefore, perhaps readers in general) are not fooled by poor work.  The perverse situation in which Paul finds himself under her care creates the almost perfect scenario for him to write; at one point, he notes that before finding himself Annie's prisoner, he would avoid writing for the most mundane reasons, like having a headache, but while he is there, he maintains a steady schedule and is productive to an unprecedented degree.  He acknowledges that he plays Scherherazade both for her and for himself.  So muse, editor, facilitator, Shah...call it what you will, but Annie helps Paul reach his creative potential.  And when she has fulfilled this role, he kills her.  LITERALLY.

Mind you, in doing so, she reveals herself to be a complete headcase, and part of what makes this novel work, I think, is Paul's reaction as her antics get further and further out of control.  His near-panic when the troopers rescue him is grounded in hysteria, and rightly so.  The deterioration of his body is made very obvious when the troopers are looking him over in this scene, and the reader is reminded of how visceral the experience of writing this novel has been.  When the original state trooper comes out to investigate Annie's house, Paul is described as 'a man with blue eyes bulging from his white and whiskery old-man's face...staring at him from behind a window, moaning through closed lips, hands rattling uselessly on a board laid across the arms of a wheelchair' (p. 259).  This is in contrast with the Paul that we hear about from before the accident, a fun-loving, free-wheeling guy who even considers picking up the attractive bank attendant before continuing on his post-book journey.  Is part of this novel, then, about the fear of getting older too?  That he won't be able to finish his 'great novel' not only because of Annie, but because he simply won't finish it?  In the previous paragraph, before this description of Paul as old, is the following:

The truth of everything was so simple in its horridness; so dreadfully simple.  He was dying by inches, but dying that way wasn't as bad as he'd already feared.  But he was also fading, and that was an awful thing because it was moronic

This problem of fading, this could happen at any age, to anyone.  And it could suck away creative talent.  In fact, the Paul described in the very final section of the book has faded.  He can no longer write, he can no longer support himself (literally, in terms of mobility), he finds it hard to walk a mile, and he even cowers at his housekeeper and cat.  At the end, he finds a creative spark, but just enough to get started (and to stop him from drinking so that he doesn't lose his creativity).

I realize that I am getting a bit ahead of myself here: let's go back to the title of the book, and Paul's book Misery.  Misery is the main character in the novel, and perhaps it describes the entire process of writing the novel in the first place: it is misery.  Misery's Return, the name of Paul's next book in the series, seems almost like a joke when considered in this context.  However, with the misery, he also finds himself deeply invested in the process and the story, and ultimately he is fulfilled by the experience.  Perhaps that bird from Africa that he saw as a child was not so sad after all.

I found many parallels in this novel to other Stephen King works, some of which were very weird.  Like, who thought that the thumb pie from Thinner would return?  Or a killer lawnmower like in 'The Lawnmower Man'?  There were also a few hints of 'The Drawing of the Three,' but perhaps that is not surprising, considering how closely these two novels were written together (in fact, did you realize that King had four novels that were published in 1987 alone?  Four?  That is insane.  And this was the year after IT).  Keflex (penicillin) is featured in both novels, for instance, which is kind of weird.  What really resonated with me in both novels was the imagery of the ocean coming in and out: in 'The Drawing of the Three,' this is a literal ocean, since almost the whole novel takes place on the beach.  In Misery, the waves on a set of pilings was likened to the pain that Paul felt as he needed his Norvil, a pain that would then gradually abate, hiding the pilings again.  King has said that this book was very much about addiction, with Annie serving as a stand-in for his own problems at the time.  This time around, I actually found the addiction issue less salient; after all, Paul becomes addicted to his Norvil, but he also does need it to keep his pain at bay.  By contrast, Eddie Dean in 'The Drawing of the Three' was a real addict, a person who had to be ripped out of his own world to stop using heroin (and even then still tried to trick Roland to get back).  Misery, to me, felt much more like an expose on writing and how wracking the process can be--Annie Wilkes or no.

One last thought: is this the first book with no mention of the supernatural at all?  Cujo didn't need any supernatural plot driver, even though there were some references to a general evil descending on the town.  But that doesn't even happen in Misery: it is simply a person who is crazy.  Maybe this is the first novel where King is hinting that the supernatural in his other books is something of a cover that hides what is really terrifying: everyday people who don't act as they should.

'The Drawing of the Three'

So as you may recall, I was not such a fan of 'Gunslinger' when I reread it, and I was so disappointed that I sought out the old version of it (instead of the revised one) to see if I liked it better.  I was slightly trepidatious that I wouldn't enjoy this book either, even though I remembered it being pretty engaging the first time that I read the Dark Tower series--as you may recall, I was also down for the count with some kind of flu or something, so my judgment may have been skewed.  However, I still enjoyed it.  It was a very quick read, as I started it Friday night and by Sunday morning, I had it done, even though I lost an hour in there to Daylight Savings (during this same weekend, I helped in a rescue effort for two bunnies, attended a very long and not great baseball game, drove around numerous locales in the greater Fort Myers area, and listening to a chunk of Berg's Lulu.  As you do).

I was somewhat surprised as the proportions of this one, as I thought for some reason that Jake showed up again and kept wondering if SK was going to cover that in one paragraph or something.  My bad.  Not this book, the next book.  And while I did enjoy the section where Eddie Dean was brought into Roland's world (it's really great!), knowing the outcome of Odetta/Detta somehow made it slightly less compelling this time around.  That being said, I did enjoy the reread, and I think the book in general makes a lot of sense within SK's works of this time.

First, you have drug addiction, which will be a significant theme in the next two books: Misery and Tommyknockers.  Misery I know well and love; Tommyknockers I vaguely remember not enjoying whatsoever, but I think it's still about addiction from what I recall.  So I guess this is SK's druggie phase, which, if I had to put a limit on it, I would say started around Christine and ends around Tommyknockers.  This seems about right, as it appears that the King family intervention to get SK sober happened right after this novel.

Second, you have SK, known as the master of horror, etc....... branching out to something new with both Eyes of the Dragon and 'The Drawing of the Three.'  Let's bear in mind that 'The Gunslinger' was not a huge success when it was published, so he was leaving horror in pursuing this project.  And 'The Drawing of the Three' is a novel that crams in an awful lot of stuff.  It has fantasy, a mob scene, a heist movie, some kind of psychological thriller, family drama, and maybe even a little bit of horror in the lobstrosities.  I even saw some of Misery being paralleled here with the scenes when Roland is increasingly ill and on his own, having to cope.  But horror by no means drives this novel.

I don't want to give away too much here, since Misery is next on the list, but Misery is, among other things, also a book about writing--or perhaps more specifically, about how sometimes you would literally have to trap an author in a bed by maiming him, then forcing him to write, in order for him to finish a project.  It feels like that sometimes.  And I am wondering if part of this sentiment was brought up by these two books which move away from typical SK and instead feature more fantasy and adventure.  Maybe Misery serves as a transition back to what he was known for doing?  Still, he could have skipped Tommyknockers.  We all would have been okay.

I feel super confident that I will be done with Misery very soon and have a new post very soon.  One of my all-time SK favorites.

The Eyes of the Dragon

The Eyes of the Dragon was one of my favorite Stephen King books when I was younger.  It wasn't scary, it was relatively short, and it was a fun adventure story.  I reread it in 2005, just because I felt like it one day and ran out to buy a copy.  In the most recent rereading of it, I again enjoyed it, and I think that it makes a great 'short' novella after IT--remembering, of course, that SK's novellas in Different Seasons were written after completing his major books. 

This time around, I was very much reminded of 'Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption' because I think that the two stories operate in very similar ways.  Both are, of course, about a man who is jailed because of a crime that he didn't commit.  But SK uses several of the same techniques too.  He gives clues about what will happen in advance, so if you are paying close attention you might put everything together.  Both men come up with elaborate plans (that rely on gifts) to make their escapes.  Eyes of the Dragon is intended for a younger audience--specifically King and Straub's kids--which I think changes the overall tone. There is also a dog as a major character in the form of Frisky, which is an idea that will stick around for SK too, particularly with the introduction of Oy in The Waste Lands.

Also worth noting, of course, is the return of Flagg, who hasn't been around for a while.  In fact, I think his last definitive appearance was in The Gunslinger (....or was it?  If you read the original, maybe not.  If you read the revised 2003 version, probably), and he was obliquely hinted at in 'Children of the Corn.'  Flagg will be back in a big way, of course, in the Dark Tower series.  In this novel, Flagg even has moments where he resembled It: he bares his teeth, he smells monstrous (according to Frisky), he poisons the sewers, and SK even refers to him as It at one point.  Not quite the same, but a terrifying monster nonetheless.

In sum, quick read, fun stuff, great adventure.  I still like this one a lot.  In fact, I am surprised that it has not been adapted, seems like it would be pretty easy to make it a compelling movie.