The Dark Half: A Novel
Stephen King
Language: English
Pages: 608
ISBN: 1501143778
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Master storyteller Stephen King presents the classic “wondrously frightening” (Publishers Weekly) #1 New York Times bestseller about a writer’s horrific and haunting pseudonym.
“I’m back...I’m back from the dead and you don’t seem glad to see me at all, you ungrateful son of a bitch.”
After thirteen years of international bestseller stardom with his works of violent crime fiction, author George Stark is officially declared dead—revealed by a national magazine to have been killed at the hands of the man who created him: the once well-regarded but now obscure writer Thad Beaumont. Thad’s even gone so far as to stage a mock burial of his wildly successful pseudonym, complete with tombstone and the epitaph “Not a Very Nice Guy.” Although on the surface, it seems that Thad can finally concentrate on his own novels, there’s a certain unease at the prospect of leaving George Stark behind. But that’s nothing compared to the horror about to descend upon Thad’s new life. There are the vicious, out-of-control nightmares, for starters. And how is he able to explain the fact that everyone connected to George Stark’s untimely demise is now meeting a brutal end of their own in a pattern of homicidal savagery...and why each blood-soaked crime scene has Thad’s fingerprints all over it? Thad Beaumont may have once believed that George Stark was running out of things to say, but he’s going to find out just how wrong he is...
stupid game, or the fact that this time they were playing it in the summer house by the lake long after summer had run away for another year. But none of it had affected her hearing in the slightest. Now it was a chainsaw she heard, snarling away in the woods at some considerable distance—as much as five miles, maybe. Closer by, out on the main body of Kashwakamak Lake, a loon tardy in starting its annual run south lifted its crazed cry into the blue October air. Closer still, somewhere here on
color had drained from her face; her forehead shone like a lamp. “This is crazy,” she said, looking from Pangborn to the Troopers and then back to Pangborn again. “Crazy. Don’t you know that?” “Listen,” Thad said, walking over to Liz and putting an arm around her, “I didn’t kill Homer, Sheriff Pangborn, but I understand now why you’re so pissed. Come on upstairs to my office. Let’s sit down and see if we can’t figure this out—” “I want you to get your coat,” Pangborn said. He glanced at Liz.
amusing and informative magazine, was a page headed with a typical People cutline: punchy, pithy, and pungent. BIO, it said. “People,” Thad Beaumont told his wife Liz as they sat side by side at the kitchen table, reading the article together for the second time, “likes to get right to the point. BIO. If you don’t want a BIO, move on to IN TROUBLE and read about the girls who are getting greased deep in the heart of Nebraska.” “That’s not that funny, when you really think about it,” Liz
now, all of this psychic shit is a side-track.” This struck Alan as a very odd thing for Thad to say . . . if he had planted the one precognitive note and lied about the other. Someone crazy enough to do such a thing—and crazy enough to forget he’d done it, to actually believe the notes were real manifestations of psychic phenomena—would want to talk about nothing else. Wouldn’t he? His head was beginning to ache. “All right,” he said evenly, “if what you call ‘this psychic shit’ is a
Pritchard—but you really can’t get all the way to the middle of what’s happening, can you?” He sounded frustrated and harried even to himself. “The guy himself admitted he wasn’t Stark.” “Oh yes. He was very sincere about it, too.” Thad laughed. “You act as though that doesn’t surprise you.” “It doesn’t. Does it surprise you?” “Frankly, yes. It does. After going to such great pains to establish the fact that you and he share the same fingerprints, the same voice-prints—” “Alan, stop a