Dark Half by Stephen King

Suspense:

King writes great suspense. There's a scene in which a cop is checking out Stark's gory, abandoned car in a quiet parking lot that had me ready to jump. Yet it was unpredictable, because the officer never actually was killed as I expected.

He creates a ticking clock by letting us know in no uncertain terms that Stark is going to go after Thad, his wife and kids and do unspeakable things to them. It's only a matter of time. He will do this unless Thad writes another Stark book, which Thad has no intention of doing, because he is sure it will kill him.

Toward the end, King jumps back and forth between the viewpoints of Thad, Stark, Pangborn and Liz. This very effectively ratchets up the suspense and makes the action move very quickly.

Language and characterization:

King has an ease of language usage. His dialogue sounds very natural, and he has a knack for succinct descriptions and word patterns that pinpoint the character.

We like Thad. He's a good, descent guy, and we care about what happens to him. I've noticed that most of King's characters have good relationships with their wives. If there are children present, they are very devoted to the children. His appealing description of the twins in this story almost made me like kids. It was very important to the effectiveness of the suspense that the reader intensely care about Thad's wife and children.

Very seldom are there spots in which the actions of the characters are inconsistent with their personalities. (Though at the end, I think that Stark would have taken a few people with him. He definitely would have killed Sheriff Pangborn when he showed up at the summer house.)

When the police first go to Thad's house and accuse him of murder, King makes it very believable. The reader can feel what it must be like to be accused of a crime that he/she hasn't committed, especially if the evidence is fairly damning, as this evidence is. Thad writes a journal entry in first person dramatizing this, which makes it very immediate and personal to the reader.

Weak points:

The logic of how the physical Stark was created is shaky to me. Thad had a twin growing in his head, which was removed when he was twelve. Apparently, Stark was inside of him somehow and emerged when Thad began writing the Stark novels. When he stopped writing the novels, Stark became a physical entity. "He didn't have to be a separate person until Thad tried to kill him."

It's pretty darned convenient that George Stark begins deteriorating because no new books have been written about him. This happens without Thad having to do anything. I thought the protagonist was always supposed to take action to defeat the enemy. But I guess the action Thad took was to stop writing the Stark novels.

Overall:

The book is an organic whole. There were no places in which I had to look back and think, "Now what's going on here? Who's this character? Etc."

Dark Half's plot pulled me right along. The murders begin close to the beginning of the book, so we know that something evil is happening right away.

The sparrows are flying -- I recently red the book and saw the film of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror." In it, the flying birds represented the soul leaving the body. This may be in folklore elsewhere. But it reminded me that horror is often derivative of other sources. (In fact, "Mr. X" borrowed heavily from "The Dunwich Horror.")

Every once in awhile I notice King breaking viewpoint. "This would be the last time I would ever . . ." Like a person telling a story, his characters often foreshadow what is to come. I like this, because it makes me anticipate what is to come, but I know that it's a form of talking to the reader and isn't generally accepted.

As far as the ending goes, here are a few things that bothered me:

- - Thad has hastened Stark's demise by refusing to write more novels. The birds signify Stark's approaching death. It's just too convenient. Once Stark returns, Thad doesn't have to take specific action to cause Stark's death, because he is already dying.

- - Thad uses a bird whistle to call the sparrows in for a final meltdown. Where did this come from? King mentions earlier something about every magician having his tools, but it seemed to me that the bird whistle came in from left field.

- - When Stark (by long-distance telepathy) stabs Thad in the hand, Stark is also wounded, however, at the end when That stabs Stark in the throat Thad is not affected. (Presumably at some point, their physical conditions became converse. When Thad started writing the novel, Stark began healing and Thad began deteriorating.) The logic of this escapes me, however.

- - At one point Stark is referred to as the ghost of Thad's twin. How can a ghost be stabbed and killed?

Toward the end I began to wonder if the whole novel wasn't a metaphor for writers' block. I especially liked, "He had learned that, if he kept at it, if he simply kept pushing the words along the page, something else kicked in, something which was both wonderful and terrible. The words as individual units began to disappear. Characters who were stilted and lifeless began to limber us, as if he had kept them in some small closet overnight and they has to loosen their muscles before they could begin their complicated dances."

What I can extrapolate for my own writing:

Darn, I had my doppelganger getting stabbed in the hand resulting in Rosalind getting cut before I read the Dark Half. Now I guess I'll have to change it, because it will seem like I'm copying.

One of my problems is that I'm choppy and uneven at times. King has a smoothness that pulls the reader right along. I know that writing for hours and hours every day, would help me to become smoother. I think because I leave the book for a several days at a time, the book cools off to me and I have to get my momentum going again.

His writing of suspense scenes is brilliant. He knows just how to escalate.

I'm wondering of I need some kind of body count in "The Dop." No one has been killed yet, but I was trying more for psychological than physical horror.

Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper by Robert Block

This story uses a very difficult-to-pull-off technique: The viewpoint character is the murderer, but the reader doesn't know until the end. The only other story I've known this to be used in was, "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd," by Agatha Christie. I had read this book because I was interested in using that technique in another book I was working on at the time. (I didn't do it, because I didn't feel myself skilled enough to make it work.)

The question is, is the writer cheating the reader by withholding the identity of the murderer until the very end? In reality, the murderer would be thinking very different thoughts. He might be worried about being revealed before he was ready. He might be thinking about how he could play with this guy then get him into a situation in which he could knife him. In a sense I did feel more cheated than if the story had been told through sir Guy Hollis's viewpoint. However, I was more surprised at the end. Since this is considered to be one of Block's best stories, I guess the technique is acceptable. He does it with such skill, however, I suspect in the hands of someone less masterful, the reader would be annoyed.

The concept that Jack the Ripper killed women in a pact with the dark forces to gain eternal youth is an interesting one. In my book Jack is also going to take part in human sacrifices to the dark gods in order to gain the ability to perform true magic and immortality.


Danse Macabre by Stephen King

Even though this book is very dated (references to books and films end at around 1980), King presents some very valuable background info about horror films and books, as well as some very insightful observations about the nature of horror.

I've written down ideas of his that sparked my interest and commented upon them.

Several of the concepts caused me to reflect on my motives for writing The Dop.

" . . . books and films which have been the most successful almost always seem to play upon and express fears which exist across a wide spectrum of people." In the 50's and 60's the monsters in horror movies were usually the result of being exposed to some form of radiation (relating to our fear of the Soviet Union and nuclear war). In the 70's horror films related more to social commentary of the times (Stepford Wives plays upon men's fear of women gaining too much power.)

" . . . we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones." I've long felt that horror is a way for people to make the real horrors of live seem less daunting.

Tales of the Hook:

"Exactly what is a monster? Begin by assuming that the tale of horror, no matter how primitive, is allegorical by its very nature; that it is symbolic. Assume that it is talking to us, like a patient on a psychoanalyst's couch, about one thing while it means another."

Allegory is built-in with horror. It says in a symbolic way things we would be afraid to say straight out.

This caused me to ponder what I was personally trying to say with the Dop? Rosalind gets involved with an evil, dangerous charismatic person. The result of is that Rosalind gains strength and deals with her problems herself no matter what kind of peripheral people are involved with her at the time. She makes a mistake, pays for it and emerges victorious and stronger than when she began.

"We're waiting to be told what we so often suspect, that everything is turning to shit."

Tales of the Tarot:

In Frankenstein we see the horror of being a monster through the monster's eyes.

"All tales of horror can be divided into two groups: those in which the horror results from an act of free and conscious will -- a conscious decision to do evil -- and those in which the horror is predestinate, coming from outside like a stroke of lightening." Psychological stories often revolve around the free-will concept.

It's the concept between id and superego, the free will to do evil or deny it.

Back to The Dop, I have to wonder if Rosalind is intentionally doing evil. Certainly, she wrongs David, her original boyfriend, and she does knowingly get involved with the dangerous guy. In a way her fault is that she was so unaware of what was truly going on (the fact that Jack was, bit-by-bit, drawing her in as an ally into his demonic world.)

The split between Apollonian (intellect, morality and nobility) and the Dionysian (emotion, sensuality and chaotic action.)

When Rosalind meets Jack, she is in an Apollonian state, working on her business, enduring her unfulfilling relationship with her boyfriend. When she decides to go with Jack, she switches over to the Dionysian state of pleasure-seeking.

King attempts " . . . to lull the readers of my stories into -- that state of believability where the ossified shield of 'rationality' has been temporarily laid aside, the suspension of disbelief is at hand, and the sense of wonder is again within reach."

Yes, King is a master of that. He says he does it through the use of details and every day settings.

Radio and the Set of Reality:

"Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door." That is absolutely true. I was so let down when I found out that "IT" was a giant spider and not the evil clown who had been appearing to the kids.

"What's behind the door or lurking at the top of the stairs is never as frightening as the door or the staircase itself. And because of this, comes the paradox: the artistic work of horror is almost always a disappointment. It is the classic no-win situation."

There is a school of writers who believe that the way to beat this rap is to never open the door at all. Blair Witch does this and I believe pulls it off fairly well.

The Modern American Horror Movie - Text and Sub-Text:

The concept of what is scary changes with the times. "Nothing in the world is as hard to comprehend as the terror whose time has come and gone." Think about "The Creature from the Black Lagoon." People were terrified by that movie and now we laugh and make wise-cracks at the guy in the rubber suit.

Stepford Wives is a film about explosive social change of the late sixties and seventies.

"Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power, and what men fear about women and women's sexuality." "High school is a place of almost bottomless and conservatism and bigotry, a place where the adolescents who attend are no more allowed to rise above their station than a Hindu would be allowed to rise above his or her caste."

"When the lights go out and we find ourselves stranded in a shoal of darkness, reality itself has an unpleasant way of fogging in." I can relate to this, because I have been terrified alone in the dark by myself in my own house during a power figure. Objectively we know there is nothing different there when the lights are out. Subjectively, we're not so sure.

Horror Fiction:

Gothic horror: " . . . ghosts, in the end, adopt the motivations and perhaps the very souls of those who behold them."

In Peter Straub's "Ghost Story," Don asks the little ghost girl. "What are you?" "I am you," she responds. "What is the ghost, after all, that it would frighten us so, but our own face." This very much ties in with the concept of the doppelganger.

"Straub has a hall-of-mirrors approach which keeps us constantly aware that the face looking out of all those mirrors is also the face looking in; the book suggests that we need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts."

In "Ghost Story," when Don makes love to the creature in its Alma Mobley incarnation, he touches her in the night and feels "a shock of concentrated feeling, a shock of revulsion -- as though I had touched a slug." During a weekend spent with her, he wakes up and sees Alma staring blankly into the fog. When he asks her if anything is wrong, she replies, "I saw a ghost." A later truth forces his to admit she may have said, "I am a ghost." A final act of memory retrieval convinces his that she has said something far more telling: "You are a ghost."

The different levels of perception really fascinate me. (Some of my favorite X-Files episodes use this technique of altered layers of perception. Just what perception can you trust?)

Inside Evil ("Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde") vs. Outside Evil ("Dracula"): "Ghost Story," as well as "The Haunting of Hill House," by Shirley Jackson blurs these lines. " . . . it is exactly this blurring about where the evil is coming from that differentiates the good or the merely effective from the great, but realization and execution are two different things, and in attempting to produce the paradox, most succeed only in producing a muddle."

Straub says, "I wanted to play around with reality, to make the characters confused about what was actually real."

He built in situations in which the characters feel they are:

1. acting out roles in a book
2. watching a film
3. hallucinating
4. dreaming
5. transported into a private fantasy

"The material is sort of naturally absurd and unbelievable, and there fore suits a narrative in which the characters are bounced around a whole set of situation, some of which they know rationally to be false."

The concept of the bad place: Haunted houses might be psychic batteries absorbing the emotions that had been spent there, absorbing them much as a car battery will store an electric charge.

"The truest definition of the haunted house would be a house with an unsavory history."

Stephen King goes into a long analysis of Anne Rivers Siddons "The House Next Door," a book I am quite fond of. It is a haunted house story about a new house, one which the protagonist watched being built on the vacant lot next door. The difference here is that the evil is being carried by the person who built the house. (Dionysian change is coming to this Apollonian suburb.)

"The House Next Door" is a frame story. Tales of the misfortunes of the neighbors are told through the vehicle of Colquitt Kennedy watching her life and way of thinking change as a result of her proximity to the house.

"Much of the walloping effect of 'The House Next Door' comes from its author's nice grasp of social boundaries."

"The purpose of horror fiction is not only to explore taboo lands but to confirm our own good feelings about the status quo by showing us extravagant visions of what the alternative might be."

"The real secret of the house next door is that it is a dressing-room for were wolves."

In "The Haunting of Hill House," Eleanor is obsessively concerned with herself, and in Hill House she finds a huge and monstrous mirror reflecting back her own distorted face." (She has been profoundly stunted by her upbringing and family life.)

"One thing we do know about Hill House is that it is all wrong. It is no one thing we can put our finger on; it's everything. Stepping into Hill House is like stepping in the mind of a madman; it isn't long before you weird out yourself."

" . . . when you tamper with a man or woman's perspective on their physical world, you tamper with what may actually be the fulcrum of the human mind.

The juxtaposition of the unimaginable terrible with the utterly ordinary achieves its peak in Ira Levin's "Rosemary's Baby." This is an urban horror story (much like Fran Lieber's "Smoke Ghost.")

King says that Ira Levin is the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel. This is why film makers have been so faithful to his plots. Pull one plot twist and everything comes tumbling down.

I always wonder why "Rosemary's Baby" stands the test of time while other horror or sci-fi films seem so hokey. Perhaps it is Polanski's expert direction. Perhaps it is the fact that the story hits us so personally and (especially if you've been brought up Catholic) tales of possession by the devil ring an especially resonant note.

"Polanski's directorial style of not aiming the camera squarely at the horror but rather letting the audience spot it for themselves off at the side of the screen coincides with Levin's writing style.

"'Rosemary's Baby' is a splendid confirmation that humor and horror lie side by side, and that to deny one is to deny the other.

The major theme of "Rosemary's Baby" deals with urban paranoia.

"Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. In a crazy sort of way, Rosemary's story is of a coming to that sort of awareness. We become paranoid before she does." Levin does a great job of creating suspense. We're worried for Rosemary. We see it coming before she does. This is an effect I'd like to be able to achieve. Levin does it with such subtlety with side glances, whispered conversations, things that are not quite right.

"Invasion of the Body Snatchers." ". . . one off-key note, then two, then a ripple, then a run of them. Finally the jagged, discordant music of horror overwhelms the melody entirely." Again, this is something I would like to do with my book, but my build-up is not effective. All of my opening supernatural elements are on the same level. I definitely need to learn to build.

" . . . the horror story is in many ways an optimistic, upbeat experience; that it is often the tough mind's way of coping with terrible problems which may not be supernatural at all but perfectly real."

"All fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power; great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at a great cost or lost it tragically."

"The Shrinking Man," Richard Matheson. "We can understand Matheson's decision to use flashbacks in order to get to the good stuff early on, but one wonders what might have happened if he had given us the story in a straight line."

Ramsey Campbell - "In a Campbell novel or story, one seems to view the world through the thin and shifting perceptual haze of an LSD trip that is just ending . . . or just beginning."

"James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell . . . write that clear, lucid, grammatical prose that only those educated in England seem able to produce."

King points out that many writers of fiction seem totally unable to explain simple operations or actions clearly enough for the reader to be able to see them in his or her mind's eye. Some of this is a failure on the writer's part to visualize well and completely. This made me examine my own ability to write clearly and made me much more aware of explanations of the actions in my story.

"James Herbert comes at us with both hands, not willing to simply engage our attention; he seizes us by the lapels and begins to scream in our faces."

Herbert on "The Fog." -- ". . . it had no limits of structure or place. It would simply go on and on until the thing resolved itself. I liked working with my main characters, but I also liked the vignettes because when I got tired of what my heroes were up to, I could go off on just about any tangent I liked. My feeling throughout the writing was, 'I'm just going to enjoy myself. I'm going to try to go over the top; to see how much I can get away with."

"You try to catch the madness in a bell-jar so you can cope with it a little better."

"My stories all speak of courage and ethic and friendship and toughness."

King's book caused me to watch some of the movies he talked about and purchase some of the horror novels (with the intention of reading them when I have the time.)

I'd say the biggest effect this book had on me was to make me question my motivations for writing what I do.