The Dark Half

The Dark Half by Stephen King
Viking - October 30, 1989
431 pages

In 1985, 39-year-old Stephen King announced in public that his pseudonymous alter ego Richard Bachman was dead. At the beginning of The Dark Half, Thaddeus Beaumont does the same. Beaumont's pseudonym is not as docile as King's, though, and he comes back for his revenge.

Spoiler alert: Nonexistent

Ah, this was the perfect cure to the aformentioned bloated mess that was The Tommyknockers. 431 pages of large font, a quick plot, and an amazing execution. I love this book. It's one of my favorite Stephen King books, right up there with such great books as Rage, Cujo, The Eyes of the Dragon, and Misery.

This is in the same category as The Tommyknockers where it was not scary because I knew that it could never happen, but if I were put in the situation I would be running and screaming and naturally going insane with terror.

King brings back one of the things that I loved in Misery, which was the insertion of pieces of the book the protagonist was writing inside the actual book. The parts that were inserted were actually supposed to be of the next Richard Bachman novel, but Bachman was then revealed.

The plot moved extremely quickly, and there were a few tangents, but the story was always brought right back to the central plot so that you would barely notice the tangents if you were reading for fun and not reviewing. Overall, it was excellent.

Grade: A-