The Dark Half - Stephen King [10]
'He'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?'
'I'm fine,' she said. 'Just cooking up some goo for the kiddos. You haven't got enough of yourself yet?'
'Not yet,' Thad said shamelessly, and went back to the article.
'The 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?
'Well, 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.
'But 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.
'Anyway, 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.
'In the best of those books, Parker is really more Re 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.
'If 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.
'Yes,' 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!'
'I'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.
'Stop what?'
'You grin, they grin. You can't feed a grinning baby, Thad.'
'Sorry,' he said humbly, and winked at the twins. Their identical green—rimined smiles widened for a moment.
Then he lowered his eyes and went on reading.
'I started Machine's Way on the night in 1975 I thought up the name, but there
was one other thing. I rolled a sheet of paper into my typewriter when I got ready to
start . . . and then I rolled it right back