The Sparrows are CREEPY!

While bouncing ideas about this blog off of friends before I started it, I was talking to my dear friend, Christopher Thornton about how to write about all of the books I had already read on the list. He suggested I make my own list of 100 books I had never read and write about that. I really wanted to stick with the original BBC list of 100 books. So, I decided to compromise. Since I am never one to read only one book at a time, I thought that I would blog about the other books I read while reading my way through the BBC list. This is one of those books. 

Not long ago, I realized that with all of the books I've read, I had never read a single book by Stephen King. Most of the reason behind this is the fact that I have just recently gotten my bravery up enough to even think about reading anything from the horror genre. So, while walking through the teacher's lounge at my school one day, I saw a pile of books that someone had put on the "give away" table. Since I can't pass up a pile of free books without looking through it, I stopped and found Stephen King's The Dark Half. I figured since it was free and sitting there, waiting for its next reader, I'd pick it up and give it a try. This was my introduction to the crazy, messed up, weird world of Stephen King. 

Written in 1990, Stephen King's The Dark Half is about a writer named Thad Beaumont. The novel starts with Beaumont as a child with a strange quirk. Thad hears birds chirping. We find out later that the reason Thad hears birds chirping is he has a malignant brain tumor. At age 11, he has surgery to have the tumor removed and the doctor reveals that inside this tumor is an eye that blinks and everything. Yeah, 15 pages into the book and I'm already thinking I'm not gonna be able to read this book at night! Jettison forward and Thad is now married, has a set of twins, and is a fairly successful writer. He writes two types of books. The books he writes under his name are mildly successful, not necessarily groundbreaking. The books he writes under his pen name, George Stark are violent, dark, crazy, and wildly successful. However, Thad decides he's done writing under Stark. He even goes so far as to have an article written in People Magazine that has a picture of him, standing over a grave with a shovel and a gravestone with George Stark's name on it. This is where the whole tumor with the eyeball gets important. George Stark isn't just a pen name, he's the eyeball inside the tumor. Turns out, he's really Thad's unborn, undeveloped twin.  And he's PISSED! He developed more and more, every time Thad wrote a book under his name until he turned into an actual person.He doesn't want to die and he realizes that in order to stay alive, he needs to force Thad to write the next book in the George Stark series. He'll do whatever he needs to do, kill whomever he needs to kill, and say whatever he needs to say to make that happen. Throughout the book, Thad sees, hears, and even controls those birds that chirped in his head as a child. Stephen King uses the tagline, The Sparrows are Flying throughout the book, bringing it into crime scenes, Thad's journal, and even as a way for Thad to confuse George when he realizes that George can't hear the birds.

There's so much more to this book, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone that decides they want to read it later. I made the mistake of reading the book before going to bed once, and I regretting that one! I had a night of nightmares that involved birds, creepy twins, and a guy with flesh falling off of his face. Which brings me to one HUGE warning. The one thing that made this book hard to read was the gore. I think gore in the movies is one thing. You see it, you can convince yourself its all makeup, and there's not much left to the imagination. Books don't give you that luxury. Everything is left to the imagination. So, when George starts decomposing because technically, he's dead King doesn't leave anything out. Stark starts losing flesh as it decomposes and falls off of his body, pus comes out of his eyes, he starts smelling like rotting flesh......its all there. There were a couple times that I had to stop reading the book because it was getting down right disgusting. 

Despite that, I thought this book was amazing. Stephen King doesn't waste any time with back story and really grabs the reader right off the bat. I found the book hard to put down after reading about 10 pages. I will say that very little of it was surprising, not a whole lot of twists to the story. I mean, basically once you figure out the guy going on the killing rampage is George Stark, Thad's dead, undeveloped pen name/twin you're done with the surprises. That isn't even much of a surprise since its in the summary on the back of the book. But, I don't want anyone to think that the fact that there's little surprise makes the book boring in any sense of the word. I got wrapped up and horrified by George Stark and how his mind worked. Granted he was technically dead and all that, but it was amazing reading about someone who honestly had no conscience whatsoever. It was also pretty creepy how fascinated Thad was by George even though he knew what he was capable of and to what lengths he'd go to stay alive. 

All in all, the book made me want to read more Stephen King. I can see why he's so successful and basically has an entire section in bookstores dedicated to his work. The book also kind of made me scared of twins, but that's another story all together. I'm not sure I'll be reading any of his books at night, and certainly not when I'm by myself, but I've learned that I can handle them and put them away, having finished the book unscathed. However, if I ever look at anyone and say, "The sparrows are flying" take all Stephen King books away from me and make me sit down and read something less horrific, something like.......Bram Stocker's Dracula. Wait, that's not much better, is it? Oh well, onto the next adventure.