'The crazed nonsense that paid the bills': reading Stephen King’s The Dark Half (1989) as a critique of the commercial imperative behind popular fiction

This paper examines the understudied Stephen King novel The Dark Half (1989). In particular, it reads the text as an authorial commentary on the often commercial imperatives behind the U.S. ‘Horror boom’ of the 1970’s and 1980’s. As King’s final major novel of the boom period, it seems significant that The Dark Half returns to the self-reflexive motif of the author of popular fiction and his desperate attempts to control his own creations. Referred to as “perhaps the most autobiographical of King’s texts” (Sears, 61) The Dark Half tells the story of writer Thad Beaumont, who, like Paul Sheldon in Misery, has a twin career, writing both respectable, ‘literary’ novels and lurid fiction under the pen name of George Stark. Stark’s novels, which might be considered mongrel dogs in their combining of a number of popular genres: “Gothic, crime fiction, police procedural and noir” (Sears, 80), have been hugely successful: “going to number one on best-seller lists coast to coast” (29). However, as the story begins Beaumont has decided to ‘kill off’ his Stark pseudonym, a choice made by Beaumont to try to re-orientate his career towards the more literary work that he favours: “I wanted to write my own books again” (29). Soon however, people connected with Beaumont’s ‘secret’ as a popular novelist are being brutally murdered by someone who appears to be a physical manifestation of the George Stark alias: “Was he supposed to believe Stark had come BACK FROM THE GRAVE, like a monster in a horror movie?” (162). Though Beaumont is, at first, adamant that “pen names did not come to life and murder people” (132) he quickly comes to realise that Stark is in fact “out there, ramming around like some weird cancer in human form” (161). Consequently, this paper will explore the novel’s often complex representation of the pernicious effects of popular fiction to elucidate what The Dark Half might loosely tell us about King’s attitudes toward the state of U.S. horror fiction at the end of the 1980s.