Book to Movie: The Dark Half

Book to movie: The Dark Half
Directed by George Romero
Written by George Romero
Based on the novel by Stephen King

In 1993, like most King novels, The Dark Half got the screen treatment. The writer and director was the legendary George Romero. King and Romero had collaborated before on the 1982 sleeper hit, Creepshow with success. This collaboration was not nearly as successful – or good.

The opening scenes are of Thad Beaumont’s childhood when he experiences tremendous headaches and eventually has to have surgery to remove what the doctor believes is a brain tumor. The surgical scene when the doctor finds out the true cause of Thad’s malady is horrific and terrifies. From there, the movie goes downhill.

Romero rewrites the King story, keeping its essential elements and events in place. In opening of the book, Thad Beaumont’s outing as George Stark is in the past. The photo spread for People is in the past. Romero opens with it and it takes the movie forever to get going. Perhaps had I not read the book and knew about all that Romero was showing me in the first 25 minutes, it would have meant more. But I’d wager that most people who went to see that movie read the book and didn’t need it.

From there, the movie flows much as the book with the series of killings of all those associated with the People magazine article. But it flows too quickly. King takes several pages of text to describe the murders in excruciating detail. Romero breezes through them.

Another dramatic change is in the description of George Stark. King’s stark was a large, blonde, “high toned son of a bitch.” Romero’s Stark is a caricature of Elvis talking like Johnny Cash. It came off as a foolish attempt to make Stark look like a 1950s reject from Rebel Without a Cause.

Other events and characters are tinkered with to make them more exciting on film. Thad’s associate at the college, Rawley Delesseps, is converted from a man into the caricature of the bizarre woman who has encyclopedic knowledge of the occult. Thad’s escape from his protective detail is much more exciting (if not as creative) than that in the book.

The end of the movie is blocked differently, but essentially the same as the King book. The sparrows do their number on Stark and carry off his remains. Thad and Liz live happily ever after and presumably Thad never writes another Stark book. Sheriff Pangborn is left to deal with the events in Needful Things.

Timothy Hutton works as Thad Beaumont and Amy Madigan is cast well as Liz. From there, casting goes downhill. Michael Rooker is horribly miscast as Sheriff Pangborn. I like Rooker and thought his debut movie, Henry, was excellent. But he comes off as a southern sheriff in a Maine community.

Having Hutton play both Thad and Stark is foolish. I know the underlying premise of the movie and book was the connection between twins, but King never implied or inferred that Thad’s twin was an identical one. In fact, King tells us that Stark is purely a conjuration of his own imagination – physical description, biography, and death. They should have cast a large blonde actor for this part just as King had written him..

Romero has made some incredible, legendary movies and he’s made some of the worst garbage to ever see celluloid. The Dark Half doesn’t have any of those moments that make you groan with agony they are so bad. There is no stilted dialogue, no gratuitous violence, no tacked on sex scenes, or bad cinematography. It has none of the things that make a movie painful to watch.

But it lacks some of the essential elements that make a film interesting like well developed characters, a plot that moves, a climax that excites.

It is interesting that this movie came out as it did because, as I noted in my review of the book, it was one of King’s tightest stories. He moved the plot along at a rapid pace compared to his other works. Yet Romero could not translate King’s tightest story into a movie that was interesting.

The Dark Half was not a bad movie, nor was it a good one. It was simply two hours of incredibly average characters in an incredibly average movie. My feelings would perhaps be more visceral had I actually paid to see the film. Had I, I would feel ripped off. Having watched it on DVD, I invested two hours in a boring film.

Danse Macabre by Stephen King

Danse Macabre
By Stephen King
Copyright 1981

October 4, 1957 and an Invitation to Dance
What was it that turned Stephen King onto horror – real horror! It was that day, October 4, 1957 when mankind altered his view of his place in the cosmos.

According to King, he was at a movie theater, viewing the sci-fi classic Earth vs. The Flying Saucers when the picture was stopped. The theater manager appeared on stage and told the audience that it had just been reported that the Russians had successfully launched Sputnik. Now, the Russians had an object in space – the first manmade object in space. We’d never look at our world the same way again.

He goes on to contrast two sci-fi movies of the era: The Day the Earth Stood Still and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. The former had helpful aliens that came to help man and prevent him from destroying itself. The other featured aliens bent on destroying mankind.

He then invites us to join him on a retrospective of horror in all its forms over the last 30 years.

The Tail of the Hook
In this rather disorganized chapter, King attempts to describe what he defines as the essence of horror and tries to differentiate between science fiction and horror.
He sees it as the Appollonian being disturbed by the Dionysian. He discusses “freaks” as in people in freak shows as horror, the common campfire story (such as the murderer on the loose at a lovers lane who has a hook on his hand), and the modern tales of horror.

He discusses E.C. Comics, the pulps of the 1940s and 1950s, the low budget movies of Roger Corman and American International Pictures, and modern horror set against the backdrop of space such as the movie Alien.

He raises an interesting point that fans’ interest in horror as a genre has ebbed and flowed over the years. It tends to flow during difficult economic times.

I understand that King is trying to lay a foundation for his analysis of horror that is to follow, but the chapter is a disorganized, stream of consciousness essay on the subject.

Tales of the Tarot
King says that before we can have any discussion of modern horror, we must go back to its roots. He defines those roots in thee novels of the 19th century: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In those three novels, we find the archtypes for horror: the creature, the undead or vampire, and the wolfman.

He first discusses Frankenstein. He tells the well known tale of Shelley and her friends stranded at a remote mansion by rainstorms. They take turns reading aloud ghost stories before all setting off to write their own tales of horror to bring back to the group.

King informs us that no novel has produced as many movies based upon it as Frankenstein. It is Boris Karloff’s character, the creature, for which the story is best known even though it is named for the creature’s creator, Baron Frankenstein.

King summarizes the novel and discusses how Hollywood, for good and bad, distorted Shelley’s story. In Shelley’s story, the creature is human enough, can reason, think, speak, and has emotions. He wants a mate. When the Baron won’t deliver, his creature seeks revenge.

As we all know, in the movies (with few exceptions), the creature is a grotesque, unthinking monster. Much less intellectually stimulating are the movies, but they make for better theater, King tells us.

King praises Shelley for her story, but pans her storytelling. Shelley is not a very good writer in King’s opinion with her monsters and their counterparts arguing as if before a Harvard debating society.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a novel of sexuality, King states. The bite of a vampire is the ultimate hickey. Sexuality and horror have always been melded and, as King points out, movie makers have always incorporated the two. Even in the Bela Lugosi incarnation of the movie, Lugosi plays the evil Count as suave and smooth – a real lady’s man.

Vampires and the undead form a large block of modern horror from the various interpretations of Stoker’s novel, their sequels which have little or nothing to do with Stoker’s novel, as well as the zombie which first appeared in film in the 1920s and was brought to the fore so aptly by George Romero’s Night of The Living Dead.

King admires Stoker’s novel although he points out that Stoker did not create the vampire as a creature of literature. That was done by a writer by the name of John Polidori with his short novel, Vampyre which King says is not good at all. It is believed that Polidori simply retold Lord Byron’s The Burial.

Ironically, King – the man who has written four novels longer than 1,000 pages – criticizes Dracula for being overlong.

It is here that King begins his effusive praise of H.P. Lovecraft, showing how Lovecraft drew upon Stoker’s style of writing to conjure creatures of his own mythos.

The character, the Wolfman, finds its basis in Stevenson’s novella. A good man is transformed into an evil being. Of the three novels King says form the bedrock of modern horror, it is Stevenson’s sleak story he likes best.

The transformation, willingly or unwillingly, is a fixture in modern horror. Everything from the movies based on the novel, from The Wolfman, to the Incredible Hulk all find their basis in Stevenson’s story.

King says one could include Henry James’ Turn of the Screw because some see it as the basis of the modern ghost story. He eschews it because James ultimately relies on the rational and psychology to form his story.

An Annoying Autobiographical Pause
King delves into his own past to try to determine what it was that led him to write horror. He first explores the psychology of horror writers. Those who loathe the genre often ask what makes people write that sort of thing. There must be something in their past that warped them psychologically.

King does have a bizarre incident from his past that he relates. When he was four, he left his house to play with a neighbor. A short time later, he returned home and refused to speak the rest of the day. His mother was horrified that the kid with whom he’d gone to play had been hit by a train. King heard later that they picked up pieces of him with a wicker basket. King has no recollection of the event and does not ascribe his desire to write horror to the event. He simply acknowledges to those who seek psychological reasons for the horror writer’s lust for the macabre, that the event is there.

When King was just an toddler, his father left the family, never to be heard from again. One day while exploring the family attic, King came across a stack of horror and science fiction pulp novels from the 1940s. King’s mother explained that they belonged to his father. King’s father, he learns also aspired to be a writer and submitted stories to pulp magazines, only to be met with rejection.

It was reading the stories in those pulps that started King’s lifelong love affair with the fantastic and the horrible.

Radio and the Modern Set of Reality
Like many of us who love Old Time Radio (OTR), King sees it as one of the great story telling media in history. Unlike television or movies, it requires the listener to engage his imagination in visualizing the story – the theater of the mind as E.G. Marshall called it in his opening to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater.

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater was completing its eight year run on radio when King wrote this book and he pans it. He says it is amusing, but a shadow of the earlier versions. His favorite shows were Suspense and Dimension X.

I fully and wholeheartedly disagree with King’s assessment of CBSRMT. That show was a staple of my childhood and many of those stories stayed with me for more than 20 years before I rediscovered it on the Internet.

He recalls his first true moment of terror as the night he sneaked down the steps of his family home and secretly listened to the radio broadcast of Dimension X episode Mars is Heaven – an adaptation of the Ray Bradbury story from The Martian Chronicles. King points out that the broadcast date of that story would have made him four years old – a bit precocious to grasp the story. I wonder if he didn’t hear the later, 1957 broadcast of the same story on the radio show X Minus One. Both shows, which adapted scripts from the best sci-fi writers of the age, were excellent.

He also discusses how movies and eventually television started out by essentially using script writing style of radio, having people describe action to the audience as it was unfolding – something necessary in radio but entirely foolish in the visual media.

The Modern American Horror Movie – Text and Subtext
King examines horror movies made from 1950 – 1980, describes their plots (the text) and the allegory they deliberately or accidentally represent (the subtext)

Some of his analysis was old when he wrote it. Who, for example hasn’t heard of or read the thinly veiled allegory of a “Red under the bed,” in Invasion of the Body Snatchers? But when he sets different movies against the time they were made, King brings forth some interesting observations.

For instance, King sees the movie, The Thing from Another World as pointing out the folly of the policy of appeasement that allowed Hitler to gain valuable time (and more Jews to die) in the run up to World War II?

It was published as a novella in 1938 by author John W. Campbell, so the timing is right. King points out that the military men on the base want to trap the thing and kill it. But there’s this mealy mouthed scientist that is sure that if we just try to reach out to it, we can learn from it. As King points out, that scientist gets his just before the military men – paragons of effectiveness and efficiency in the 1950s, dispose of the creature.

Compare that reliance on the surety of the military in the 1950s seen in such films as The Thing from Another World, Them!, and Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers against how the military was portrayed in 1970s works such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the military were the bad guys who were too eager to kill the aliens without first trying to understand them. King accounts for this by pointing out two generations’ experiences with the military: World War II versus Vietnam.

King provides many more examples and I’m not going to rewrite the chapter for him. But one example really jumped out at me because it was the movie was a favorite of mine as a child, but has not withstood the test of time. King states that the movie, The Amityville Horror (and Jay Anson’s book by the same name) are an allegory for the financial insecurity the middle class felt in the 1970s.

Yes, it’s supposed to be based on a true story, but everybody knows it’s not. But the theme that runs through the novel is finance. The house is priced cheap. We learn that right away. George Lutz’s contracting business is struggling. The nephew loses $1,500 cash in the house and George writes a check to cover the balance of a catering bill for the young man’s wedding, convinced that the money is still in the house. George finds the bands that wrapped the money, but the cash is gone and the check bounces. Finally, the family walks away from the home.

Perhaps it’s a better allegory for today’s economy. How many people have homes (meaning mortgages) that are terrorizing them and eating them alive.

King provides commentary on the quality of the movies (or lack thereof) he examines, but makes no recommendations. The chapter is a semi-scholarly examination of the horror movie and how it fit within the context of the times.

The Horror Movie as Junk Food
King turns away from analysis of great cinematic horror and to what he calls the “junk food” of horror. While the term is meant to be pejorative (as it should be because so much of cinematic horror is junk), he likens this exploration of Hollywood and independent B-movies as an mining expedition – finding a small diamond amidst all the coal.

The greatest of these independent B-pictures, made with just pennies for a budget, was George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Romero is a film maker with a mixed reputation for making some damned good movies and some truly tasteless, useless pictures such as Last House on the Left.

But even casual horror fans are familiar with Romero’s sensational Living Dead series. King mines deeper to find great scenes in otherwise bad films. He pans the awful Roger Corman film, Little Shop of Horrors, but is taken with the scene where Jack Nicholson delights in the pain of tooth extraction.

Nobody made as many bad horror films as Roger Corman (except maybe Bert I. Gordon), but King finds a few well written and well acted scenes in several of Corman’s abomoninations.

One of King’s favorite bad movies is the 1979 movie, Prophecy. I found this film passable, but not good. King delights in it. He likes the setting of New England and the film’s core premise. But he’s just as quick to pan its many plot and casting shortcomings.

He also delves into the irredeemable picture that is so bad you just have to laugh. Pictures such as Robot Monster and Plan Nine from Outer Space bring joy in how funny they are trying to take themselves seriously.

What is remarkable as King explores the dregs of horror films is that he does not explore deeply the works of Ed Wood and Bert I Gordon. These guys, forerunners of Roger Corman who tried so hard to turn out gritty heroes and horrifying monsters on low budgets, thought they were making serious pictures. They tried to replicate the success of Universal Studios and MGM on low budgets. I always looked on these two directors as tragic because, unlike Roger Corman who just wanted to put something out there that might be marginally entertaining, Wood and Gordon thought they were making great movies. It’s a shortcoming in King’s analysis that he did not draw more from their body of work.

The dregs of horror as we know it today – what is often referred to as “torture porn” – had not yet been invented. I’ve never watched a torture porn film, but between the gratuitous, over the top gore, there might be some good scenes.

The Glass Teet, or, This Monster Was Brought to You by Gainesburgers
The term, Glass Teet, was coined by writer Harlan Ellison who richly despised television as a story telling medium and dedicated a volume of work panning it and those who enjoy it. As King points out, Ellison is not saying that television sucks. He’s saying people suck AT television.

Very few television shows based on horror have lasted long. Censorship (also called network standards and practices) inhibited unleashing real terror. A few gems have made it onto the small screen, although they’ve not lasted long.

King considers Thriller, hosted by horror legend Boris Karloff as they greatest of them all. It lasted but two seasons. He also holds the first of two seasons of The Outer Limits in high regard (for which Ellison penned two episodes). But he pans a couple favorites of the genre such as The Twilight Zone and Kolchak: The Nightstalker.

King admits that by panning The Twilight Zone, he’s spitting on an icon and acknowledges the high regard with which the series is held in the horror genre. But he says it was transparently moralistic, sappy, and didn’t really horrify. He does acknowledge that the show had great episodes and great moments, but credits the writing of men such as Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury (who wrote but one episode – an adaptation of his own story, I Sing the Body Electric), and Charles Beaumont.

He implies that Rod Serling’s best writing was done for other shows and for a few great movies such as the script for Planet of the Apes. He even uses Serling’s own words to back this up where Serling, in his final interview, admits that he thought that only about one third of the Twilight Zone episodes were great, one third average, and one third poor. I think King and Serling are both giving Serling short shrift. There were certainly some poor episodes of the Twilight Zone. But the show was also presented some of the most memorable moments in television history. It would seem my favorite writer and I have divergent tastes in what makes good television.

As for Kolchak, King states that the two movies based on a poor novel were fantastic. The great Richard Matheson scripted both movies and made them into primetime movie of the week hits. The series, King says, replicates the slow decline of the Universal Studios horror genre from horror into comedy. Kolchak, King says, was too much camp, not enough horror. I agree. The show has a faulty premise. Horror demands that the reader or viewer suspend disbelief. But the story must be plausible and for this newspaper writer, week after week , to stumble into the realm of the supernatural only to have his editor kill the fantastic story, is just too much.

Kolchak is not without its charm and I do enjoy watching several of the episodes. Darrin McGavin makes Kolchak a likeable and sympathetic character. Some of the stories are actually intriguing if not horrifying. But as King points out, when it seemed that the horror was falling short, the writers went for camp and the show just fizzled. Nonetheless, I remain a fan and enjoy watching an episode of this 1970s relic from time to time.

Horror Fiction
King dedicates about one third of his book to naming and analyzing what he thinks are the great books written between 1950 and 1980. Some of them I’ve read, some I’ve not.

The first book he lists as great is Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. I must admit, I’ve never read this, but have heard from others that it is an excellent book. I’ve seen the movie and it was enjoyable enough. But, as one can tell from my blog, I spend a great deal of time comparing books and the movies based on them and know too well a so so movie can be made from a great book.

I’ve read only two Straub novels: Shadowland, which was ok, and Koko which I thought was dreadful.

King claims that it was Ghost Story that created the American gothic tale as the old men of the Chowder Society did battle with the ghost that inhabited their town as well as the guilt from a horrible past wrong they committed in their youth.

He also dedicates a great deal of words in a divergent summary and analysis of Straub’s first published book, Julia.

For the great haunted house books of that era, King nominates Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Anne Rivers Siddon’s The House Next Door. To King, these are the archetypes of what he calls, “The Bad Place” of horror. A less modest man (and King is not a particularly modest man) would have included King’s The Shining. But maybe Mr. King was more modest in the late 1970s.

Jackson’s novel about psychic experiments inside the dark and foreboding Hill House still stands at the pinnacle of the sub-genre of haunted house books. Written in the 1950s, Hollywood is still cranking out movies based on it (although none as good as the 1963 version called The Haunting). King himself took a crack at retelling Jackson’s story in an uneven – and sometimes dreadfully bad -- three part miniseries entitled Rose Red.

Siddon’s book, King says, transplants the haunted castle of European literature to American suburbia. I’ve never read Siddons’ book and to my knowledge, there was never a movie made about it. The story is told by observers watching as several successive residents who inhabit the home next door to them go insane.

As King describes it, The House Next Door is the stuff of Hammer Horror set in suburban Atlanta. His advocacy for the book has encouraged me to seek it out and take it in at some later date.

To his list of great horror novels of 1950-1980, he adds Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby. He credits it, along with The Exorcist, for bringing horror novels back into vogue in the 1970s. I don’t know if I would rank Rosemary’s Baby in my top 10 novels of all time, but it would rank high. Before I discovered Stephen King, I discovered Ira Levin. As a pre-adolescent, I took in Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, and the Boys from Brazil, all of which I found on my mother’s bookshelf. They, along with Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings, were my introduction to adult horror literature.

King sees Rosemary’s Baby as a novel that was simply a product of the times. It was penned during that era when Time magazine displayed its controversial cover bearing the headline, “Is God dead?” With God dead or dying, (he wasn’t, but leave it to the media moguls of New York to try to slay him), the birth of Satan’s child in New York to a middle class couple fit right in with the times.

Rosemary’s Baby is also a rare instance where the movie is a straight retelling of the novel. Roman Polanski, who had his run-in with pure evil when his lovely wife was murdered by Charles Manson, and committed great evil when he raped a 13 year old girl, made a masterful movie and Mia Farrow who would go on to encounter evil when she married a pedophile, was exceptional in her portrayal of Rosemary Woodhouse.

King provides some great insight into Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers which is next on his list. According to King, Finney says he had no political ideology, no allegory, no metaphor in mind when he wrote The Body Snatchers. Like most great story tellers, he simply wanted to write a good story.

This is another book I read as a child and have not picked up since. My recollection of it is hazy, but I’ve watched both movies based on it recently. The 1956 Kevin McCarthy version is close to a straight retelling as I recall. King says the story works so well because of its setting in a small town, where everybody knows everybody else. Small towns tend to be insular. Everybody knows everybody’s business, but they don’t share it with outsiders. What better place for aliens to stake their claim in our world?

Next on King’s list is Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. While he includes it on the list of great novels, he’s critical of Bradbury’s writing style, saying parts of it are over written. This comes from a man who practically invented over writing.

I think King misses what Bradbury was going for in his tale of a haunted carnival coming to the now mythical Green Town, Illinois. It is an adult novel told in a child’s voice from a child’s point of view. What do children do once they start to put together sentences? They talk too much. Is there too much narrative in Something Wicked. . .? Perhaps, but Bradbury does make us feel like it is a child telling us the story and there is something special in that.

Where King criticizes Bradbury on one hand, he offers high praise on the other. He says many writers are defined as horror writers, science fiction, writers, adventure writers, fantasy writers. To King, Bradbury is simply Bradbury – all things to all readers. High praise indeed – and true!

At the time of King’s writing, Disney had not yet made its entertaining, but not overly great movie based on the second of Bradbury’s Green Town trilogy.

Next on King’s list of the pantheon of horror fiction is Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man. Why he chose this instead of Matheson’s I am Legend is beyond me. I have read both and while I think The Shrinking Man is a good book, I think I am Legend is a GREAT book that has inspired three direct movie retellings and redefined the whole genre of zombie stories.

King does not say it in this book, but has said in other writings that it was Matheson more than anyone else who inspired him to write horror fiction. He calls The Shrinking Man, “. . .another case of a fantasy novel packaged as science fiction in a rationalistic decade when even dreams had to have some sort of basis in reality.”

As King points out, Matheson, like Bradbury, eschews hard science fiction in favor of telling a good story. If you want to know how things work, King tells us, read Robert Heinlein or Larry Niven. If you want to read a good story, take in Matheson or Bradbury.

Matheson’s shrinking man is affected by radiation, just like the big bugs of the 1950s movies. Matheson has given us our foundation in rationalism to tell a great adventure tale of a small man conquering large obstacles inside his own home – doing battle with his cat and later, in the cellar, with a black widow spider.

In its time, King postulates, it tells of man’s shrinking importance in a society becoming increasingly dominated by machines.

King adds Ramsey Campbell's The Doll Who Ate His Mother to the list. I’ve reviewed on collection of Ramsey Campbell stories and, looking back on it I was too harsh on Campbell for those stories, more than a year later, still resonate with me. I’ve never read a Campell novel.

Campbell’s novel is about a supernatural cannibal who eats a man’s arm shortly after it is amputated. King says that Campbell provides a new take on the horror archetype Dracula as the three main characters hunt down the creature.

The most obscure entry into King’s list of legendary books is James Herbert’s The Fog which King points out bears no connection to the John Carpenter film of the same name. In Herbert’s novel, a strange fog is released from a canister lost by the government. That fog invades an small English town and causes the people to commit maniacal murder upon each other.

What sets Herbert’s writing apart, King tells us, is how “he seizes our lapels and begins to scream in our faces!” in his story.

King brings his list of 10 important novels to a close by including Harlan Ellison’s collection of short stories, Strange Wine. It is clear that King is an astute admirer of Ellison’s. Those in the writing trade either hate or love Ellison just as Ellison either hates or loves them. A caustic personality is Harlan Ellison.

King goes on for several pages and more than a thousand words about Ellison and his short stories before telling us that Strange Wine is a great collection of fables packaged as fantasy and science fiction.

King wraps up by informing us that horror literature is a booming industry filled with garbage to be avoided. As garbage, he points out two writers whose works I have enjoyed: John Saul and Frank DeFelitta. While neither Saul nor DeFelitta (who wrote Audrey Rose) never wrote anything with the epic feel of The Stand or the sheer terror of The Shining, they never wrote anything so bad as Gerald’s Game.

The Last Waltz – Horror and Morality, Horror and Magic
King wraps up his tome of terror by informing us that horror is, at its essence, always a morality tale. For horror to work, evil must be contrasted with good. Bad events hurt. Good events bring happiness. Bad people are to be punished. The good are to be rewarded or at least made into heroes if they meet their end.

King’s book is badly dated with age, but still full of wonderful information for lovers of classic horror and science fiction such as myself. It would be a treat to see him update it, but King only writes non-fiction books every other decade.

Endurance: Shakelton’s Incredible Voyage

Endurance: Shakleton's Incredible Voyage
By Alfred Lansing
Copyright 1958

One of the great benefits of being a member of a book club is reading books you would otherwise never consider reading. I am not a fan of seafaring adventure. I’ve never read a book regarding seafaring other than books about the Titanic and the Edmund Fitzgerald and have no real interest in maritime subjects. I was not thrilled when this was the book of the month for our group, but decided to read it anyway since another member was willing to lend it to me and I didn’t have to shell out for it. I am truly grateful that it was lent to me because I thoroughly enjoyed this incredible tale of perseverance and survival.

Lansing tells the tale of the ill fated Imperial Trans Antarctic Expedition led by Ernest Shakleton. Shakleton, a man of large, but subdued ego, had been bested in the attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole. He decided he would place himself at the fore of great adventurers to be the first to traverse the continent on foot.

Shakleton selected his crew rather capriciously with some interviews lasting no longer than five minutes. Yet, when it was crunch time and each man had to reach down deep inside to survive and each man had to put aside his own discomfort, Shaklteton’s crew performed with stoicism unrivaled by any account I’ve ever encountered.

Shakleton and his crew set out for Antarctica in a wooden barquentine ship called Endurance. They sailed into the Weddell Sea, hoping to make landfall on the Antarctic continent and start their journey across. Before they could make landfall, the ship became hopelessly locked in an ice floe.

Lansing drew heavily on the journals kept by the crew of the Endurance, so one can believe that what is in Lansing’s book is the authentic feeling of those who survived rather than an author retelling a tale to make it more heroic. The Endurance was locked in this ice for ten months. During this ten months, the crew actually seemed to enjoy themselves. They had scant few books or other sources of entertainment to serve as a diversion. They had only their duties and time to kill, yet they looked upon it (at this point) as a positive experience.

The Endurance, however, could not endure the extremes of the Antarctic. For ten months, she drifted north with the pressure of the floe building on her hull. Finally, she began to groan and creek and was eventually crushed. The crew salvaged what they could from her including stoves, food, and three boats, and set up camp on the floe as their ship was reduced to kindling and eventually sank.

On this ice floe, the crew remained for a year. They survived on the scant rations they scavenged from the Endurance, seal meat, and penguins. When meat was scarce, they dined on their pack dogs. The floe took them slowly northward. All through this, Shakleton kept his crew functioning as a team.

Lansing does not portray each of these men as saints. Shakleton had some troublemakers among his crew. How he managed the troublemakers made the difference. Rather than shunning them or keeping them at a distance, Shakleton would embrace the most problematic of his crew. By keeping them close to him, he could keep them away from men of less resolve who would be distracted by their antics.

As they drifted north over the year, the floe upon which they camped got smaller and began to develop serious cracks. Eventually, Shakleton put his men into three small boats and set out for Elephant Island which was just a couple hundred miles away.

Keep in mind, this was before the time of GPS, radar, or any electronic guidance. They navigated by stars, moon, and sun. Elephant Island, despite its name, was not a large body, yet this crew braved frigid cold and harsh seas to get there. The navigation skills exhibited by his navigator, Frank Worsley astound the mind.

Their arrival on Elephant Island was the first time the crew had stood on terra firma in 500 days, but it was not a happy time for them. Their shelters, constructed of stones chinked with snow and topped with a lifeboat and tarp were cramped and inhospitable. The seal oil they burned for heat and cooking covered them in soot and they had not bathed or shaved for more than a year. Their small beach on Elephant Island afforded them little lee from the vicious blizzards that assailed them. Staying on Elephant Island, awaiting rescue, was not an option.

Finally, Shakleton resolves to cross 650 miles of open sea in a sixteen foot open boat to Georgia Island where there was a whaling colony. He selects his crew and sets off, promising his men he will return with rescue.

The final third of Lansing’s book is incredibly enthralling as he documents the discomforts and pains suffered by the crew sailing the Antarctic seas in an open boat and by those left behind on Elephant Island with nothing but time and penguins to kill.

Aboard the boat, men tried to sleep atop the bags of ballast stones in deerskin sleeping bags that were decomposing. As the bags rotted, the hair that lined them got into their mouths, their food, and their water. Provisioned for only four weeks, they could not afford to throw away any food or water, spoiled or not. They endured storms. They dared harsh winds to break away ice from their mast that would have capsized the boat had it been allowed to remain. Their navigator, Frank Worsley, seldom slept over that month as he made constant adjustments in their course to get them to Georgia Island.

Meanwhile, back at camp on Elephant Island, the men were miserable. The stove heated their makeshift cabin, but often filled it with smoke. Some men snored loudly, making it impossible for others to sleep. The floor often flooded. Food was meal after meal of penguin or seal. Entertainment was nil. A few men kept journals which served as the only diversion. One man suffered a heart attack and managed to survive. One man had all the toes on one foot amputated because of gangrene brought on by frostbite. As the months passed, each privately began to give up hope although none would give voice to the thought. They agreed to give Shakleton until the middle of August to rescue them.

Shakleton and his men make it to Georgia Island, but they’re on the wrong side. Their boat is destroyed and a mountain range and glaciers stand between his crew and the whaling camp. No man had ever traversed that obstacle, but Shakleton knew it was his only option. He and two other men set off, leaving the other two behind to await rescue. They scaled the mountain.

Three times they went up, only to be met with ridges and cliffs that could not be descended. Having endured so much over so much time, Shakleton would not be thwarted. Finally, in an act of desperation, he and his men careen down a glacier, sliding on their asses at high speed. A collision with a rock would have killed them. Just a small ridge of rock sticking up out of the ice would have literally ripped them a new one. Somehow, they made it to the bottom and found the camp.

The men at the camp could scarcely believe Shakleton’s tale. He and his crew were presumed lost. When they heard his tale of riding an ice floe, then crossing to Elephant Island in the three small boats, they were amazed. When they heard how he and his crew of four crossed 650 miles of frigid sea in an open boat, they were in awe.

Boats were dispatched to the other side of the island to pick up the two men left behind. They were allowed to shave, bathe, and acquire new clothing. But Shakleton wasted little time in going back after his men on Elephant Island. But his frustration was not yet ended.

Three times, Shakleton led voyages toward Elephant Island only to be stopped by weather or ice. On the island, one by one, the men lost hope and began living to die. Finally, on August 30, Shakelton made it. He evacuated his men back to Georgia Island. There, Lansing’s tale ends.

The book was exceptionally well received by my book club. There were a couple (one an English professor and poet) who found the writing dry, bereft of metaphor and simile in saying, “it was cold.” They compared it to journalistic writing. However, they agreed the tale was compelling enough to keep them engaged.

Indeed, this was a story that even the worst professional writer would have to work hard at telling badly.

After reading it, it is still hard for me to conceive that it was true. For me, with the ever short attention span and constant need for mental diversion, the time killing aspect was compelling. I simply can’t conceive of spending that much time without a book, without a movie, without something to occupy my thoughts.

Lansing is guilty of saying again and again, “it was cold.” Yet many in our group remarked that they felt cold while reading it, even though it was the August monthly selection. As a person who can bask in 90 plus degree weather and finds 40 degrees to be cold, the phrase, “it was cold,” repeated over and over again was almost entrancing. I was cold when I read this book.

I probably will not willingly revisit the maritime story willingly. As I stated, it’s not what I enjoy because I have little experience with it in real life. But this one time visit to the genre I liken to visiting an amusement park while on vacation. I had a splendid time while I was there, but probably won’t go back.

The Dark Half by Stephen King

The Dark Half
by Stephen King
Copyright 1989

When we last visited Castle Rock, we visited Castle Rock of the past. It was 1960 and Gordie LaChance and his friends traveled across the Maine countryside to see a dead body.

Our next visit opens around that same time. Thad Beaumont is 11 years old and has one a writing contest with a short story. Young Thad enjoys writing stories and longs to write more. But before he can get his budding literary career going, he is afflicted with killer migraine headaches.

He has the classic symptoms of a brain tumor. He has seizures and an x-ray reveals a mass on Thad’s frontal lobe. An operation will be necessary to remove the mass and determine if it is malignant or benign.

When the doctors open Thad’s skull, they receive the shock of their lives. Instead of a mass of cancer, they see a clouded eye. Once the shock wears off, the doctor explains that what they are seeing is the remainder of Thad Beaumont’s twin which he absorbed in the uterus. The doctors remove the eye as well as a couple teeth and a fingernail that continued to grow long after the fetus that was Thad’s twin was absorbed.

We then flash forward to the year 1988. Thad and his wife are looking at a People magazine article written about themselves – or more specifically about Thad and his other half. The picture with the article features Thad and his wife, Liz, standing before a tombstone that bears the name, George Stark. Below his name is engraved, “Not a Very Nice Guy.”

Stark was Beaumont’s pen name. Under his own name, he wrote one novel that won an American Book Award and two more that did not fare so well. Depressed over the failure of his books, Thad adopted a pen name and began writing violent, gangster novels featuring a hero named Alexis Machine. Those novels did quite well and earned Thad a great deal of money.

But a law student stumbles onto Thad’s secret. He tries to blackmail Thad, but Thad thwarts the greedy blackmailer by outing himself. He no longer wants to write Alexis Machine novels anyway and he resents the intrusion. So, the publisher stages the publicity photo and article to kill George Stark once and for all.

A few days after the photo session in the cemetery, Castle Rock’s grave digger finds a giant hole in the ground where there ought to be no grave. He also notices claw marks in the hole as if someone were pulling themselves up and out and footprints leading away from the grave.

That evening, a man is murdered in Castle Rock and his truck stoeln

The next day, Castle Rock County sheriff Alan Pangborn (having taken over as sheriff after the death of George Bannerman in 1983 when Cujo did a number on him) show up at Thad’s doorstep prepared to arrest him. Pangborn and the state troopers with him tell him there has been a murder in Castle Rock and the murdered man was beaten to death with his own prosthetic arm. The man’s vehicle has also been located and Thad’s prints are all over the murder scene.

Thad has an iron clad alibi. He held a party that evening for members of the faculty at the college where he teaches English. He was in their company into the wee hours. Sheriff Pangborn has quite the conundrum. He has irrefutable evidence that Thad literally wallowed in a murder victim’s blood, yet Thad could not have possibly been there.

The next day, in New York, the young law student is sliced and diced with a straight razor. Then Thad’s agent is killed. The killer makes her call Thad and he listens with abject horror as the murder cuts her throat with a straight razor. Thad calls Sheriff Pangborn and tells him what has just occurred. Police protection is provided for everybody else in the city who was associated with the People magazine article. But against a man as strong and as wily as George Stark, police protection is no good.

He goes on a murderous rampage that night until everybody he can find associated with the People magazine photo shoot and article are dead.
Written on the wall, in blood, at each murder scene is the phrase, “The sparrows are flying again.”

The authorities are perplexed since Thad was obviously at home when the murders occurred in New York. Thad and his family are provided police protection. A wiretap is installed on their home phone. They wait for another call.

They don’t have to wait long. A man calls claiming that he once believed he was George Stark and tells Thad that he spent time in a mental hospital. Now that he’s killed these people, he’s got things straight. He knows he’s not Stark. Thad knows it is really Stark and that Stark is trying to fool those who are listening into believing a rational explanation.

Shortly after Stark’s call, Thad retreats to his study and falls into a trance. He awakens to find that he’s written several cryptic words and phrases in pencil, one of which is “The sparrows are flying again.” Thad is sure he knows what has happened and knows he’s responsible.

Sheriff Pangborn stops by the Beaumont residence one evening and Thad and Liz lay out a theory that they can hardly believe themselves. They tell Pangborn that the killer is none other than George Stark who has somehow come to life to seek revenge for having been killed off. Pangborn is incredulous and dismisses the theory. But he can’t dismiss the fact that science and reality are conflicting with each other in the case.

Meanwhile, Stark is cooling his heels in Greenwich Village. He’s purchased some Berol Black Beauty pencils and pads (Thad always wrote Stark’s novels with Berol Black Beauty pencils) but finds he can’t write. He needs Thad to help him with that. He decides it’s time to head for Maine and find his other half so they can start the new Alexis Machine novel. It is Stark’s hope that, as the process gets rolling, the writer will be the one to die and the nom de plume will be the survivor.

Thad tells Pangborn about the surgery he had as a child. Thad doesn’t know all the gory details, but knows enough to perk Pangborn’s interest because the sheriff is grasping at anything now that will help him solve the murder committed in his jurisdiction.

Pangborn tracks down the surgeon who performed Thad’s operation. The surgeon tells the sheriff what they found that day and about a strange event that occurred at the hospital that evening. As young Thad convalesced after his surgery, the hospital was besieged by sparrows. Thousands of sparrows descended upon the hospital, slamming themselves against the glass windows and the wall of the hospital

Thad decides to seek out information on what the sparrows have to do with the entire episode. He consults his friend and fellow professor Ronnie Delesseps (a name that hard core King fans will remember) who teaches a class on American folklore. After some research, Delesseps tells Thad that sparrows are psychopomps. Psychopomps are creatures that guide spirits to and from the material world to the spiritual plane. He warns Thad that they are not to be messed with.

A short time later, as Thad and his police escort are gathering some files in Thad’s office, Delesseps tells Thad he has a call in his office. Thad answers the phone and it is Stark. Stark is calling from his home. He is holding Liz and their twins hostage. Stark tells Thad that he must lose his police protection and head for home if he wants to see his family again.

Thad slips his protective detail with Ronnie Delesseps’ help and heads for his Castle Rock summer home where he is to meet Stark and his family. As he heads there, he notices that there are sparrows everywhere.

Meanwhile, Pangborn gets a call from a Castle Rock local who says someone has just driven a car out of his barn out in the country. He says it is an old Toranado with Mississippi plates and bearing a bumper sticker that reads, “High toned son of a bitch.” This matches the description of the car Thad conjured up in his own imagination when creating George Stark. Pangborn heads for the Beaumont’s summer home as well.

Pangborn drives to the Beaumont summer home and notices that the woods and the road are covered by sparrows. He tries to sneak up on the home, but Stark catches him and takes him back and adds him to his cache of hostages.

As Thad makes his way toward his summer place, he can barely pass because of the sparrows that are in the road and flying around. He eventually makes it and is relieved to find his family unharmed. Stark, however, is looking pretty bad. He is literally decomposing before his eyes. It’s time to write, Stark tells Thad. Thad can feel himself warming to the task.

They go to Thad’s study and Thad writes the opening paragraphs to the new Alexis Machine novel. He presents them to Stark who approves of them with delight. Thad notices that, after the writing, Stark’s appearance has improved. Thad invites Stark to crank out a few paragraphs. Stark takes the pencil and finds that, in the presence of his other half, the words flow and he writes fantastic prose.

Meanwhile the sparrows are swarming outside the residence. Thad knows that Stark does not know about or even notice the sparrows. When Stark is deep in his writer’s trance, Thad produces a bird call and sounds it. The sparrows attack. They crash through the windows and collapse the wall in Thad’s study. They begin to devour Stark. He fights with his straight razor, but to no avail. There are simply too many birds. The sparrows eventually take off, carrying the remains of George Stark off to another plane of existence.

The epilogue opens with a chapter from the new Thad Beaumont novel, The Sudden Dancers. The narrative then cuts away to the aftermath of the bird attack. Pangborn knows the truth and knows the truth will not suffice to explain the murders of so many people. Therefore, he and Thad decide to burn the place to the ground with all of the sparrows and all of the evidence. There, the story ends.

Stephen King, he of the long and sometimes laborious back story, he of the dozens of intricate subplots and minor characters, tells one of his most linear and straight forward stories in The Dark Half. Other than Carrie, which was written by a much less mature King, no other King book is easier to read.

The book was inspired by the death of King’s own pen name, Richard Bachman. The circumstances that killed George Stark are almost exactly like those that killed Bachman. Like the fictional Thad Beaumont, King decided to out himself and Bachman on his own terms rather than let a meddlesome third party do it.

King has made it clear in various essays that he was not pleased about the outing of Bachman and that he had plans for the nom de plume, including publishing Misery under his name. One can’t help but think the inspired writing of the killing of the various parties involved in the outing of George Stark was inspired by this real life anger.

But the book is more than just King telling a tale based on his own bitter experience of being outed. It is about the dual nature of the writer. When a writer is writing, he’s not himself. He’s not necessarily another person, but he is not the person that others see, interact with, or even know. The writer is living entirely within his own head. The writer is God in the world he inhabits inside his head and behaves as such.

The writer finds sympathy with the most evil people and beings. He commits acts in his books that he would not otherwise commit. He unleashes terrible events and harms the innocent. The writer (or the muse if you are so inclined to believe) is much different than the person.

People assume that writers of horror are twisted, mentally ill people. By all accounts, King is your average Joe. He owns a home (actually, several of them). He loves his wife and kids. He hates signing autographs, he loves rock and roll music and the Boston Red Sox and is a politically active Democrat. If one can ignore the fact that he is one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century and is making his mark in the 21st, King is as average as they come.

It is in The Dark Half that King sets the stage for the climactic ending of his series of novels set in Castle Rock. He has introduced and developed Sheriff Pangborn. He’s given us nodding acquaintances with Pangborn’s deputies. We’ve learned the names of a few of Castle Rock’s more important citizens and businesses such as You Sew and Sew and the Mellow Tiger. King will give us one more flyover of his fictional city in the novella, The Sun Dog published in the collection, Four Past Midnight before bringing the action to a head in Needful Things.

A note on Ronnie Delesseps. This was the original name in the story, The Crate, that was included in the movie anthology Creepshow. Delesseps was the college professor beleaguered by the crass, noisome wife. The name was changed to something more pronounceable in the movie.

The Dark Half does not rank among King’s best works, but stands as a good one and a worthwhile read. It’s not a bad first book for someone who’s never read King before. While Stephen King fans embrace King’s lengthy character development and subplots, they can distract the casual reader. No requisite knowledge of the lore of Castle Rock is necessary to enjoy The Dark Half. It is a story that is fast paced, has a plausible premise, and a great climax.