Week 7: The Darker Half

This week's book:
The Darker Half
By Stephen King

With IT just coming out in the theaters and Halloween just around the corner, I thought I would read Stephen King's The Darker Half for this week's book. I have read a few Stephen King's books and even one of his son's books too.

Yet another reason I picked this book was, I have been doing book challenges the last two years and one of the books on this year's list was a book written by an author writing under a different name. I thought a book about someone's alter ego killing people, which is written by King who has written under another name himself.

King is in good company with other authors using different names then their own. In the 1800's female authors often used male names just so they could be published such as Jane Austin and the Bronte sisters. But women aren't the only ones: Mark Twin is a member of this club as well.

Back to The Darker Half though. It wasn't my favorite. It took four hundred pages to finally kind of make sense. If you don't know the plot, here is a quick summary; a writer has been writing under a fake name and created an alter-ego. When the truth comes out, he and his wife make a mock funeral and say this other fake author is dead. Well, people start showing up dead and it looks like this alter-ego is the one killing them, but since he's not real, who's killing everyone? All fingers are pointed to the original author.

I have always said that as awesome as King is at writing stories, he never knows how to end a book. His books sometimes end up being a million pages because he doesn't know how to end the book. The little boy in "Stand by Me" (the movie version of King's The body) doesn't ever know how to finish his made up stories. Autobiographical, anyone?

I can't say I would recommend the book. I know at one point I saw the movie they made of this book, but I really can't remember a darn thing about it. If you are wanting to read some scary Stephen King go and out and read IT. IT is my favorite of King's scary books and is everywhere for cheap due to the new version that can't possibly be better then the one from the early 90s with Tim Curry.

Or if you really want to be scared stupid read Night Shift by King, which is a very close  second to IT. It's a collection of his storter stories and has Children of the Corn in it. Children of the Corn literally scared me for like a week to drive through a cornfield, which stinks because if you didn't know, our subdivision is surrounded by cornfields on three sides.