The Dark Half

New York: Viking Press, 1989. First Edition, First Printing. 1/4 cloth. Fine/fine. A fine first edition, first printing in a perfect, fine dust jacket. Appears unread. Black paper boards over black quarter cloth spine. SK in gold foil on cover, title in gold foil on spine. Purple endpapers. First published by Viking Press and complete number line 1-10. Dust jacket shows $21.95 US price. Dust jacket is pristine and flawless. Dust jacket now protected in a clear, removable, archival cover.. Octavo, 6 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches tall. This is not the first time that Stephen King has written a dark allegory of the fiction writer's situation. ''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. Mr. King's new novel, ''The Dark Half,'' is 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 womblike dungeon'' of his imagination.Thaddeus Beaumont is the writer in question. At age 11 he writes his first story. Around the same time he begins to get excruciating headaches, which culminate in a convulsion. Surgery reveals something startling - first an eye, then other small fragments of an incompletely absorbed twin that's lodged in his brain. This sort of ''in utero cannibalism,'' according to his doctor, is not unusual, although rarely is anything left undigested, as it is in Thad Beaumont's case.The operation is a success, and Thad grows up to be a mild-mannered professor of creative writing, a doting husband and the father of twins, a modestly successful writer of novels with titles like ''Purple Haze.'' But under the pen name of George Stark he is the best-selling author of ferocious thrillers like ''Sharkmeat Pie,'' the protagonist of which is named Alexis Machine because he kills like one.Circumstances force Thad to own up to his pseudonym, which in any case has become irksome. He has decided to go it on his own, to lay his fictional self to rest. He and his wife even hold a mock burial service for George Stark, papier-mache tombstone and all. But one morning a man-sized cavity is discovered at the site. Footprints lead away. Very soon, people begin to die horribly, in particular everybody associated with Thad's decision to bury George Stark, whose prose style governs the graphic and gruesome descriptions of the murders. For George Stark has materialized. As Stark himself puts it, ''The word became flesh, you might say.''But George Stark is not content to be merely undead. He wants to be alive entirely. He wants Thad to begin another novel under Stark's name. In fact, he wants to collaborate with Thad, to learn how to write, to become independent. Unless Thad complies, Stark will truly fade out of existence, for his flesh has begun to rot, decay, stink and ooze fluids, although no outside force seems capable of destroying him. Thad is forced to comply, for Stark has taken his wife and children hostage. As the collaboration gets going, Stark begins to heal; Thad develops running sores.On the whole, Mr. King is tactful in teasing out the implications of his parable - never mind an author's note that acknowledges a debt to ''the late Richard Bachman,'' Mr. King's own pseudonym, without whom ''this novel could not have been written.'' No character in the novel comes right out and says, for example, that writers exist (at least to readers) only in their writing, that each person (at least to himself) is his own fiction, that the writer's imagination can feel alien to him, a possessing and possessive demon, a Dracula arisen to prey on the whole man and his family. Nor does anyone in the novel say outright that reality inevitably leaks fiction, which then floods reality, that reality and fiction feed on and feed each other, that they are at war yet they are twins - so identical that attempts to say which is which only lead to more fictions. Such things are better left unsaid, anyhow. Stephen King is not a post-modernist.He is, however, a very good storyteller. ''The Dark Half'' mostly succeeds, as both parable and chiller, in spite of occasional cliches of thought and expression and bits of sophomoric humor (the F.B.I. is ''the Effa Bee Eye,'' marijuana is ''wacky tobaccy''). At the end, the decent family man wins out, but at a cost - which is how it should be. Most readers, I believe, will want decency and reality to triumph, but only with some reluctance, only after their most monstrous imaginings, like George Stark, have been unearthed and indulged. And few writers around are better than Stephen King at giving readers what they want." NY Times