In 1985, 39-year-old Stephen King announced in public that his pseudonymous alter ego, Richard Bachman, was dead. (Never mind that he revived him years later to writeThe Regulators.)At the beginning ofThe Dark Half(1989), 39-year-old writer Thad Beaumont announces in public that his own pseudonym, George Stark, is dead.Now, King didn't want to jettison the Bachman novel, titledMachine Dreams, that was he working on. So he incorporated it inThe Dark Halfas the crime oeuvre of George Stark, whose recurring hero/alter ego is an evil character named Alexis Machine.Thad Beaumont's pseudonym is not so docile as Stephen King's, though, and George Stark bursts forth into reality. At that point, two stories kick into gear: a mystery-detective story about the crime spree of George Stark (or is it Alexis Machine?) and a horror story about Beaumont's struggle to catch up with his doppelganger and kill him dead.This is not the first time that Stephen King has written a dark allegory about the fiction writer's situation. As theNew York Timeswrites, "Misery(1987) is a parable in chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his audience, which holds him prisoner and dictates what he writes, on pain of death.The Dark Halfis a parable in chiller form of the popular writer's relation to his creative genius, the vampire within him, the part of him that only awakes to raise Cain when he writes, the fratricidal twin who occupies 'the womb like dungeon' of his imagination."--Fiona Webster