” The Dark Half ” by Stephen King is a horror novel originally published in 1989 .

Thad Beaumont is a teacher , family man , author of pretentious novels that don’t sell well and he has a secret . He is also the author of violent thrillers under the name of ” George Stark ” and someone is attempting to blackmail Thad about this . Thad does the smart thing and just goes public with the fact that he is George Stark / He will stop writing under that name . Soon after various people involved in the blackmail start getting killed in ways that resemble a Stark novel . Thad also starts getting visions of these murders accompanied by sounds of birds and finds himself writing stuff down outside of his control . He starts getting calls from someone claiming to be George Stark whom also threatens to kill Thad’s family . To top it off Thad becomes the primary suspect in the murders so he has to solve this mystery to save his family and clear his name .

Don’t want to spoil too much so I’ll just say that this is in my top five Stephen King novels . It’s not bloated , it has characters you give a damn about , and a sinister villian that makes sense to the story . The movie based on it is good too but read the book first .