The Dark Half Read Online Free PDF

at the end of the piece. Thad had to leaf through four pages (two of them full-page ads) to find the name. Mike Donaldson. He and Mike had sat up late, just shooting the shit, and when Thad had asked the man if anyone would really care that he had written a few books under another name, Donaldson said something which had made Thad laugh hard. “Surveys show that most People readers have extremely narrow noses. That makes them hard to pick, so they pick as many other people’s as they can. They’ll want to know all about your friend George. ”
    â€œHe’s no friend of mine,” Thad had responded, still laughing.
    Now he asked Liz, who had gone to the stove, “You got it together, babe? You need some help?”
    â€œI’m fine,” she said. “Just cooking up some goo for the kiddos. You haven’t got enough of yourself yet?”
    â€œNot yet,” Thad said shamelessly, and went back to the article.
    â€œThe hardest part was actually coming up with the name,” Beaumont continues, nipping lightly at the pencil. “But it was important. I knew it could work. I knew it could break the writer’s block I was struggling with . . . if I had an identity. The right identity, one that was separate from mine. ”
    How did he choose George Stark?
    â€œWell, there’s a crime writer named Donald E. Westlake,” Beaumont explains. “And under his real name, Westlake uses the crime novel to write these very funny social comedies about American life and American mores.
    â€œBut from the early sixties until the mid-seventies or so, he wrote a series of novels under the name of Richard Stark, and those books are very different. They’re about a man named Parker who is a professional thief. He has no past, no future, and in the best books, no interests other than robbery.
    â€œAnyway, for reasons you’d have to ask Westlake about, he eventually stopped writing novels about Parker, but I never forgot something Westlake said after the pen name was blown. He said he wrote books on sunny days and Stark took over on the rainy ones. I liked that, because those were rainy days for me, between 1973 and early 1975.
    â€œIn the best of those books, Parker is really more like a killer robot than a man. The robber robbed is a pretty consistent theme in them. And Parker goes through the bad guys—the other bad guys, I mean— exactly like a robot that’s been programmed with one single goal. ‘I want my money, ’ he says, and that’s just about all he says. ‘I want my money, I want my money. ’ Does that remind you of anyone?”
    The interviewer nods. Beaumont is describing Alexis Machine, the main character of the first and last George Stark novels.
    â€œIf Machine’s Way had finished up the way it started out, I would have shoved it in a drawer forever,” Beaumont says. “Publishing it would have been plagiarism. But about a quarter of the way through, it found its own rhythm, and everything just clicked into place. ”
    The interviewer asks if Beaumont is saying that, after he had spent awhile working on the book, George Stark woke up and started to talk.
    â€œYes,” Beaumont says. “That’s close enough. ”
    Thad looked up, almost laughing again in spite of himself. The twins saw him smiling and grinned back around the pureed peas Liz was feeding them. What he had actually said, as he remembered, was: “Christ, that’s melodramatic! You make it sound like the part of Frankenstein where the lightning finally strikes the rod on the highest castle battlement and juices up the monster!”
    â€œI’m not going to be able to finish feeding them if you don’t stop that,” Liz remarked. She had a very small dot of pureed peas on the tip of her nose, and Thad felt an absurd urge to kiss it off.
    â€œStop what?”
    â€œYou grin, they grin. You can’t feed a grinning