I've read the book "The Dark Half" by the great man Stephen King.
The thing is that I haven't just read it, I've analysed some of it and I've
written about the author and the book itself.

***

Stephen King - The Dark Half

Movie Trailer

The book was also made into a movie, which can be bought.

Here is the trailer for The Dark Half movie

Sources

Sources:

Internet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_King
http://www.stephenking.com/index.html
http://www.flicr.com

Books
The Dark Half by Stephen King (New English Library Edition 1990)

Self Evaluation

In the beginning I was really insecure about the whole setting of the book. It was a type of book that I have never really liked to read before but when I first got started I got engrossed with it. It takes some time to get in the actual ’reading mode’ because the author has written the book in a way that makes it a bit heavy to read, but not too much. I really like the way that he has composed the sentences and the way that he goes into details without describing too much. When authors write to many details it sometimes gets too boring and the concentrations slips away. When it’s hard to read a book it isn’t fun to read and what is the point in reading then? I think that Stephen King has managed to write a book where he balances this fine line in a way that he and few others can.

Another thing that I like about this book is the characters and the way he describes them and uses their personality to make a good plot. The characters behave in a way that is important to the things that are happening in the book and it makes the book more understandable when you know the person you’re reading about.

The plot itself is really something special. To make up the complex characters and the plot probably needs a lot of thinking. Everything is put nicely together and everything fits. There is a lot of foreshadowing and every little detail fits. To make an example we can take the classic “gun on the shelf” scene. It’s like the family who is sitting in the cabin and then we read about the wife moving the gun further away while getting the glasses. Later on in the book the man shoots his wife with the gun that earlier in the book lay on the shelf. It’s not actually like that in the book, and it is not so specific about it, but you know that when you read about something it’s going to affect something later in the book.

Character Profile

Thad Beaumont is an ex-alcoholic who currently lives with his wife and kids, the twins William and Wendy. He lived two lived some years when he was writing as another man, a man that wasn’t a very nice one. Now he hasn’t drunk in years and he has just buried the pseudonym which made him an unpleasant man to be around. He is short-tempered but has a warm and welcoming heart and a man that is loved.

Thad Beaumont was born in 1949 and is 44 years old when this story is told. The book doesn’t describe a lot of his physical features but we get to know how he acts by the way King writes. “He was a gentle man, but strangely clumsy; that part of the boy he had been still lived in him” he writes in the beginning of the book which tells us that maybe his clumsiness is going to do more in the book than we know. He may be thin because it says that he has lost some weight, but he could also still be normal sized. He is about 6,1 and has shoe size ten and we only get to know this because they needed it in the investigations in the book. Stephen King doesn’t describe him as anything special.

In the main time period of the book Thad is confused and tired. In the beginning he is troubled by the fact that he has buried George Stark and he can’t smile without forcing it. He is really a kind person and he’s good to anyone, even if he’s clumsy. He may seem a bit cold and somewhat distant but his good nature puts up to that. When he was writing as George Stark he changed. He became more isolated from his wife, and he was grumpy and didn’t really like to talk. He was alcoholic and he had trouble with that later in his life.

The only thing that makes Thad Beaumont stay in his home and not run a way is his wife and his twins William and Wendy. He knows that George Stark is after him, but he can’t just run away from the people that he loves the most. He is severely confused when it comes to what he shall do about the mess he’s in. He knows that Stark may come after his family so he tries nearly desperately to find a way to catch him without leaving his family behind and run. The psychological aspect of Thad makes the book really exciting because there are no way you can know what he’ll do next and how he will react. He is a complex person and he is a heroic person in the loving way. Which basically means that he loves those who is close to him and will do everything he can to protect them.

About the author

Stephen Kinghttp://www.flickr.com/photos/thirdwise/2460872549/

Stephen Edward King was born in 1947 in Portland. His parents divorced when he was a kid and he and his brother was brought up by his mother. When he attended the University of Maine at Orono he wrote a week column in the school newspaper and he was active in politics and he was an active member of Student Senate.

He got married in January in 1971 with a girl named Tabitha Spruce. Since Stephen couldn’t find a job as a teacher at once, the couple lived on the money he earned as a labourer at an industrial laundry, and she helped with loans and savings. The got an occasional boost of money when he’d wrote a short-story, but even if there wasn’t a lot of money they lived good.

He wrote his first story called “The Glass Floor” in 1967 and it was published in Straly Mystery Stories. During the first years of his marriage he wrote some short stories and novels to some magazines, but he had to decrease his writing to only write in the weekends when he became a teacher at a High School. In 1973 he got his novel “Carrie” published and on Mother’s Day that year he got to know that the paperback sale would provide him the means to stop teaching and go into the world of fiction full time if he wanted.

He has three children with his wife and three grandchildren. After the first book got published he really got enough money to do nothing more than write books. And he did. Through the last 30 years he has wrote some books and he is famous for his unique writing style. Stephen King thinks that the best way to write a story isn’t to plot the whole thing first, but to plant a seed and work it out from there. He seriously believes in this way of writing and there was once a very ill woman that asked how a long going series would end since she believed she wouldn’t live to the end, and he asked he did not know.

He is also known of the way he writes a lot of details, and he certainly does. He makes up really small stories in the books and links them to the main event with the characters and fictional towns. He writes 2000 words each day because if not, he says, you can’t call yourself a decent author.

Summary

”The Dark Half” is about an author with the name Thaddeus Beumont and his alter ego George Stark. When Thad was a child he had some serious headaches and he heard a lot of sparrows chirping, but there were nothing the doctors could do to help him. One day he convulsed on the front lawn and he was brought in to surgery. The doctors found something very, very interesting in his brain, but told everyone that it was a tumour which they removed.

Now he’s a grown married man who earned a lot of money when he wrote as George Stark. But when he wrote as Stark he changed and was spacing out every now and then. He became more distant to his wife and his whole appearance changed. This was stressful for the family and after a while they decided to go public with the whole pseudonym. They arranged a funeral with a fake grave and a fake tombstone for the press, but after a while strange things started to happen. Thad didn’t need Stark anymore, Thad had started writing good books under his own name, but Stark wanted nothing of that. Insane things start to happen far away from Thad, and he gets linked to a murder. But he wasn’t even close to the crime scene, so something really rare is happening, and he has some trouble finding the truth. While all this was going on the headaches came back and the sparrows started chirping again.


The book is dark and kind of twisted because it was based on a real story. Not that everything happened like the book, because they certainly did not, but Stephen King himself wrote under another name for some time ago. While he wrote books under the other name Stephen also changed but as insanely much as the character in "The Dark Half"