Introduction
Part One
Part Two
Noon – 2 p.m. THE DARK HALF (1993)
I think we can all agree that writing has been very good to Stephen King, and it certainly seems to be something he enjoys doing for a living, given the fact that he still puts out approximately seventeen books a month. Yet a casual glance at the writer characters in his work reveals a certain, I dunno, ambiguity about the matter. There’s Jack Torrance, the frustrated novelist of The Shining, who tries to bludgeon his family to death. Paul Sheldon of Misery attempts to retire his most famous character and ends up the prisoner of an obsessed fan. And in George Romero’s adaptation of The Dark Half, we have Timothy Hutton as Thad Beaumont, an author of serious but poorly-selling literary fiction who achieves success with dark, violent novels published under the name George Stark. When a blackmailer threatens to out Beaumont to the press, the author takes matters into his own hands, confessing his Stark-ness and staging a mock funeral for his alter ego. The matter seems resolved until George Stark comes to life and goes on a killing spree, for which Beaumont is the prime suspect.
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