After threatening Thad and his family, Stark is suddenly attacked by thousands of sparrows that pick him up and carry him away into the night sky. Asked by his wife whether his deadly alter ego was truly dead, Beaumont replies, “The book is closed on George Stark.”
LIZ BEAUMONT: The loving wife of Thad Beaumont, Liz encouraged him to adopt the pseudonym of George Stark when he suffered from writer’s block. She was equally supportive when Thad decided it was time to go public with the pseudonym before a man named Fred Clawson exposed the once well-guarded pen name to the public.
SHERIFF ALAN PANGBORN: The current sheriff of Castle Rock, he took over after the previous sheriff, George Bannerman, was done in by a rabid dog. Although never truly convinced by the fantastic idea of a writer’s pseudonym coming to life, early on in the investigation he does become convinced that Thad Beaumont is innocent of the brutal murders that crime scene evidence seems to indicate he committed. Although he is taken prisoner by Stark, the sheriff survives the frightening misadventure. Pangborn’s further adventures in the Stephen King Universe are chronicled in Needful Things.
FRED CLAWSON: The “creepazoid” (so nicknamed by Liz) who discovered that George Stark was Beaumont’s pseudonym. He had been intending to reveal the truth to the public, hoping to blackmail Thad in the process for some of his wealth. But sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: Stark goes to Clawson’s seedy apartment and mercilessly shreds him with his straight razor.
Note: it’s possible that Fred Clawson also appeared in The Dead Zone. Near the end of that novel, Johnny meets “a real camera nut” named Mr. Clawson at the courthouse. Clawson was there to take a driver’s test.
THE DARK HALF: ADAPTATIONS
The motion picture version of The Dark Half appeared in 1993, although it had actually been shot and completed a few years earlier (a series of financial problems involving the production company, Orion Pictures, kept the completed movie on the shelf). The R-rated picture was adapted and directed by George A. Romero, an outstanding director (Night of the Living Dead, Martin, Bruiser) who had been friends with the author for many years. Romero had already helmed King’s screenplay for Creepshow (1982) and had adapted other King stories for Creepshow 2 (1987).
Not surprisingly, Romero’s 122-minute adaptation follows King’s novel quite faithfully, effectively capturing the proper tone and essence of “a Stephen King novel,” a rare achievement. Romero elicits fine performances from an outstanding cast: Timothy Hutton as Thad Beaumont/George Stark, Amy Madigan as Liz Beaumont, and Michael Rooker as the sheriff of Castle Rock, Alan Pangborn.
The Dark Half remains one of the best adaptations of a King work by one of the horror film genre’s most influential directors.
THE DARK HALF: TRIVIA
• On the Dark Half movie posters, the character of Thad Beaumont (or is it supposed to be George Stark?) bears an uncanny resemblance to Stephen King.
• It’s quite likely that King named Thad Beaumont in honor of Charles Beaumont (1929–1967), an author who is best remembered for writing some of the most chilling episodes of television’s classic The Twilight Zone.
• Timothy Hutton also appears in another Stephen King movie thriller dealing with the dangers of the writing life, Secret Window, starring Johnny Depp.
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NEEDFUL THINGS
(1991)
Stephen King, well known for creating an atmosphere of intimacy, takes it one step further in Needful Things. This 1991 novel was his farewell to Castle Rock, Maine, the small New England town that served as a backdrop for The Dead Zone, Cujo, and the memorable short story “The Body.” The book, the last installment of a loose-knit trilogy begun in The Dark Half (where Castle Rock sheriff Alan Pangborn first appeared) and continued in the short novel The Sun Dog (the story of longtime resident “Pop” Merrill’s demise), is the author’s last visit to Castle Rock. The destruction of the town was reportedly an attempt on King’s part to rejuvenate his writing, to move on to other things. As he explained, King “wanted to finish things, and do it with a bang.”
King beckons readers into his world with a punchy prologue, captioned “You’ve Been Here Before … ,” narrated by an unnamed Castle Rock gossip. The chatty narrator knows a little bit about everything, revealing secrets to an unidentified listener who stands in for the reader. The narrator sets the stage, dropping interesting tidbits about the denizens of Castle Rock, and about the new store that’s about to open there, a curious operation called Needful Things.
Expertly articulating his thesis of the village as a microcosm of society, King takes us into the hearts and minds of a handful of the townspeople, simultaneously revealing the nobility and evil in each of us. He also explores small-town America in a way he hadn’t done since ’Salem’s Lot, detailing the social structure and the unwritten rules of rural life. Needful Things is both drama and satire, a critique of American consumerism and greed, and of small-town life in general. King revisits themes from prior books, apparently trying to shake the dust of one style of storytelling off his feet before moving on to a new phase. It is at once one of his more cynical and one of his more hopeful books.
A store called Needful Things opens in Castle Rock during an unseasonably warm spell in October 1991. Eleven-year-old Brian Rusk is the first to meet the proprietor, a tall, kindly, strange old man wearing an old-fashioned smoking jacket. Introducing himself as Leland Gaunt from Akron, Ohio, the owner cuts the first of the many deals he will make with the denizens of Castle Rock—he sells Brian a 1956 Sandy Koufax baseball card worth $100 for cash (85 cents) and a seemingly harmless “deed.” In Brian’s case, it involves splattering a neighbor’s clean sheets with mud. Over the next eight days, several other locals make similar bargains, and perform similar deeds.
Only Gaunt knows the ultimate purpose of these deeds. His strategy, honed over centuries, is to sow discontent, then reap a horrible bounty. Each deed acts to unleash a little of the rage simmering beneath the town’s calm façade. The hatred and envy that exist between neighbors, the hatred of one religious group for another, the insecurities people conceal from the light of day—all these are grist for Mr. Gaunt’s mill. Only Sheriff Alan Pangborn, distracted by the past, and by the increasingly violent and bizarre incidents occurring in his jurisdiction, has a prayer of stopping Gaunt before he achieves his goals.
The plot of Needful Things—a stranger comes to town, wreaking havoc for his own evil purposes—is certainly not unique. King himself used it before in ’Salem’s Lot (1976), and later in his 1999 teleplay Storm of the Century. The basic plot comes from a rich tradition in American literature for chronicling events in small towns, from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesberg, Ohio to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town to Don Robertson’s Paradise Falls. The horror/suspense genre has similar entries, most notably Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Charles Beaumont’s The Intruder, and Richard Matheson’s short story “The Distributor.”
In Needful Things, as in Something Wicked This Way Comes, evil, once confronted, flees. This harkens back to The Stand, where Flagg disappears, leaving only a pile of clothes. The comparison doesn’t end there, however, because, like Flagg, Gaunt escapes to spread evil in a new locale.
The book showcases King’s many strengths. He lovingly populates this novel with vivid, three-dimensional characters, and then sends them to their appointments with destiny. King’s characterizations are brief but effective. Although the story hurtles from one situation to another, he never has to reestablish his characters, to remind readers who they are. Of course, he also expertly manipulates his readers’ emotions, raising anxiety levels to new heights.
Gaunt is a fascinating character, not at all unlike Randall Flagg or Andre Linoge from Storm of the Century. He is an evil creature. If he was once human, he is certainly not human now. This self-styled “electrician of the human soul” delights in “cross-wiring” potential victims to achieve maximum chaos. Like Mr. Dark of Something Wicked This Way Comes,
Gaunt travels the world, feeding off the misery of others. He does this through subtle manipulation and misdirection, exploiting human weakness and greed wherever he finds it.
Gaunt’s background is vague. Echoing Bradbury’s description of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Circus, and his own thumbnail sketch of Randall Flagg in The Stand, King tells us, “He had begun business many years ago—as a wandering peddler on the blind face of a distant land … a peddler who usually came at the fall of darkness and was always gone the next morning, leaving bloodshed, horror, and unhappiness behind him. Years later, in Europe, as the plague raged and the deadcarts rolled, he had gone from town to town and country to country in a wagon drawn by a slatthin white horse with terrible burning eyes and a tongue as black as a killer’s heart. He sold his wares from the back of the wagon … and was gone before his customers, who paid with small, ragged coins or even in barter, could discover what they had really bought.”
Gaunt changes with the times, eventually coming to hawk his wares in a series of storefronts around the world. Where he belongs on the hierarchy of evil beings in the Stephen King Universe is unclear, though certainly he would place below Flagg. And yet they aren’t that dissimilar. It could be, if they aren’t one and the same, that all of these—Gaunt, Flagg, Linoge—are of the same species, brothers in a sense.
It seems that no matter how many times they’re defeated, these evil creatures return to plague yet another beleagured mortal hero, in this case Alan Pangborn. Pangborn exemplifies how tenuous happiness is in the Stephen King Universe. In the grand King tradition, he has lost a soul mate (like Ben Mears, Andy McGee, Stu Redman, Ralph Roberts, Mike Noonan, and Roland the Gunslinger before him) and his son (as do Louis Creed and Donna Trenton) in a car accident. Haunted by the memory (Alan can’t fathom why his wife, normally careful about wearing seat belts, failed to buckle up that fateful day), and by the bizarre events he experienced in The Dark Half, Alan has tried to move on, losing himself in his job as Castle Rock’s sheriff and in his relationship with Polly Chalmers. It is this example of humanity, with his vast array of human emotions, who turns out to be Gaunt’s nemesis, not unlike so many before and after him, including many of those named above, as well as Mike Anderson from Storm of the Century, a tale that differs from Needful Things most particularly in the desires of its villain, and the severity of the secrets hidden by the townspeople.
Interestingly, the hero and the villain of the piece don’t meet until the final pages of the novel, where, after shaking off Gaunt’s last-ditch attempt to distract him, Pangborn sees through the mask the demonic salesman presents to the public. Echoing the end of Something Wicked This Way Comes, Alan uses white magic against Gaunt. First, he opens a “magic” can of snakes that once belonged to his son. The snakes, momentarily given life by Gaunt’s belief in magic, attack him, causing him to reveal his true demonic form. Alan then produces a bouquet of paper flowers that generates an intense burst of white light. Finally, he uses his talent at creating hand shadows to invoke the ghosts that haunt the town (the sparrows from The Dark Half, and Joe Camber’s dog Cujo).
On a final note, Brian Rusk is an interesting anomaly in the Stephen King Universe. Eleven years old, he’s still young enough to maintain a child’s sense of wonder, a trait that sometimes saves children from severe harm in King’s world. Here, however, Brian’s naiveté makes him the perfect dupe for Gaunt. By making him complicit in his evil, Gaunt strips Brian of his childhood, thrusting him without warning into the wicked adult world. Brian, unable to cope with his guilt, sees no way out but suicide.
NEEDFUL THINGS: PRIMARY SUBJECTS
LELAND GAUNT: A shadowy figure who turned out to be an ancient, evil creature, Gaunt arrives in Castle Rock to fill the void left by the late “Pop” Merrill, whose novelty store, the Emporium Galorium, had burned down a few months before. Gaunt’s modus operandi is simple—he gives the people what they think they want (Pop, his mortal predecessor, called it “selling the worthless to the thoughtless”), secures promises to perform some dirty tricks, and then sits back and watches the ensuing mayhem. Then, at the crescendo of hysteria, he sells his customers the weapons they need to efficiently eliminate one another.
Over an eight-day period, Gaunt tightens his grip on the town, exacerbating existing feuds and suspicions between various citizens into violent conflict, and even triggering a battle royal between the local Baptist and Catholic congregations. To tie up loose ends, Gaunt flunkies Buster Keeton and Ace Merrill level the town with several tons of TNT.
On the verge of achieving his unsavory goals (he’s been harvesting the souls of his victims, keeping them in a hyena-hide valise), Gaunt is finally confronted by a more formidable opponent in Sheriff Alan Pangborn, a man he has until that time studiously avoided. Pangborn simultaneously exposes Gaunt’s true plan and demonic visage, and wrests the bag of souls he has stolen from his grasp. His plan thwarted, Gaunt flees Castle Rock, and proceeds to establish a new store called Answered Prayers in Junction City, Iowa. It would be foolhardy, however, to presume that he still resides there.
ALAN PANGBORN: The sheriff of Castle Rock, Alan Pangborn had lost his wife and son in a car accident. His life was haunted by the memory of the accident, and by a series of bizarre events he experienced in relation to a writer named Thad Beaumont. Alan tried to move on, losing himself in his work and in his relationship with Polly Chalmers.
Gaunt recognizes Pangborn as someone who could upset his plans. An amateur magician, and so able to appreciate the power of misdirection, Pangborn is the first to see the connection between the strange events in Castle Rock and Gaunt’s store, Needful Things.
By instinct and intuition, Alan manages to access a kind of white magic, with which he drives Gaunt from Castle Rock. Later, he leaves the ruined town in the company of Polly Chalmers and Norris Ridgewick.
According to a statement made by Norris Ridgewick in Bag of Bones, Alan Pangborn moved to New Hampshire with Polly Chalmers.
POLLY CHALMERS: Polly, a Castle Rock native, left the town as a young woman when she became pregnant. Too proud and headstrong to accept her parents’ assistance, she moved to San Francisco to have her child. There, tragedy struck—Polly’s baby died in an apartment fire. The pain of this loss affected Polly as much as the pain of the arthritis that turned her hands into misshapen claws; the episode was so shattering to her that she never told anyone about it, not even her boyfriend, Sheriff Alan Pangborn.
Polly later returned to Castle Rock, where she eventually opened an establishment called You Sew and Sew, located across the street from Needful Things. Gaunt traps Polly by curing her arthritis—he gives her a locket called an Azka, which relieves her pain. In payment for the Azka, Polly plays a trick on Ace Merrill. Performing her errand out at the old Camber place, Polly hears growling coming from a barn. Looking that way, she sees “two sunken red circles of light peering out at her from the darkness.” Afraid Joe Camber’s fearsome St. Bernard has risen from the dead, she hurriedly completes her deed and flees.
Her happiness at escaping her arthritis blinds her to Gaunt’s evil, and almost costs her her relationship with Alan—she questions Alan’s love after she is manipulated by Gaunt into believing he had made inquiries into her past. Ultimately, Polly escapes from Gaunt’s influence by literally embracing her sin, which takes the form of a huge fanged spider. Her triumph over Gaunt enables her to assist Alan in seeing through the old man’s trickery, paving the way for his eventual defeat.
Polly left town with Alan and Norris Ridgewick. She currently resides in New Hampshire with Alan Pangborn.
BRIAN RUSK: This eleven-year-old is the first citizen of Castle Rock to shop at Needful Things. After showing Brian around the store, Gaunt asks Brian what he really wants. Brian, an avid baseball card collector, responds quickly—he wants a 1956 Sandy Koufax rookie card. Gaunt not only has the card, but, strangely, the card is autographed to someone named Brian. In exchange for the card, Gaunt takes eighty-five cents in cash,
and secures Brian’s promise to play a “prank” on Wilma Jerzcyk—he tells Brian to throw mud on Wilma’s clean sheets drying on her clothesline. Later, after Gaunt tells him he’s not done paying for the baseball card, he hurls rocks with notes tied to them through Wilma’s windows, destroying her TV and microwave oven. Consumed by guilt over what he’s done, Brian commits suicide with his father’s rifle, after telling his younger brother, Sean, to never go into Needful Things.
NETTIE COBB: Nettie killed her abusive husband after he maliciously broke a piece of her precious carnival glass, and spent the next few years as a resident of Juniper Hill, a local mental institution. Later, sponsored by Polly Chalmers, she attempted to rejoin society. Her attempt is short-circuited by Gaunt’s machinations as he sets her on a collision course with the volatile Wilma Jerzyck. When Hugh Priest kills her dog with a corkscrew, Nettie assumes Wilma did the deed. Grabbing a meat cleaver, the grief-stricken Nettie attacks the knife-wielding Wilma on a public street. Both women die in the grisly battle that ensues.
WILMA JERZYCK: Wilma is a hulking battle-axe who lives for a good fight. Primed by Brian Rusk’s attacks on her property, she sees red and sets out in search of revenge against Nettie Cobb, whom she assumes was responsible. Both women die in the ensuing confrontation.
HUGH PRIEST: In return for a coveted fox’s tail, Hugh kills Nettie Cobb’s beloved dog, Raider. Hugh eventually squares off against bar owner Henry Beaufort in a gun battle that costs him his life.
The Complete Stephen King Universe Page 19