Word: starks
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...million publishing deal, the author plays with a twist of the old good-twin, bad-twin theme. Novelist Thad Beaumont, who lives in Maine (as does King), collided with writer's block a few years ago and rescued his career by writing four novels under the pseudonym of George Stark (just as King has written five novels as Richard Bachman). These tales, unlike Beaumont's, were violent, brutal and very successful. Now Beaumont, writing on his own again, wants to bury Stark...
...dice. Stark, actually the ghost of Beaumont's fetal twin, who was incompletely absorbed in utero (the medical horror here is the book's only high-voltage shocker), comes to life as a cunning psychopath who, somewhat ludicrously, is determined to keep on writing. He slices up Beaumont's agent and editor and several other innocents with a straight razor, in scenes so lovingly detailed they would be called pornographic if the author had given the same attention...
...usual, King's prose is fast, simple and sloppy. He has young Beaumont in 1960 use the current slang "get off on," meaning enjoy, and lets an elderly English professor say he will "loan" the hero a car (old pedants say "lend"). The climax has the brutish Stark absurdly trying to write another novel to keep his ectoplasm from sloughing away in rivulets of goo. Characterization is perfunctory, with an odd exception: Beaumont's eight- month-old twin babies are vividly and charmingly described. For King fans this may be the sort of thing that sustains the myth that...
...concedes that her artistic vision is "distinctly Asian" in its stark simplicity and virtual requirement to "look inward." If it, and her almost single-minded devotion to work, can be traced to anything, it is to the close- knit, ascetic world of her family. Her parents fled China just before the Communist takeover in 1949 and eventually settled in Athens, Ohio, where her father, a ceramicist, taught for many years at Ohio University, and where her mother, a poet, still does. Her older brother, Tan, is also a poet. Lin's family in China, which included an architect...
...article begins with the premise that "Something is a bit odd about people who proclaim 'I want to help other people"' and implies that "something" is that these people are stark raving mad. In the third paragraph, for example, the author quotes one woman as saying "What still strikes me, is I'll go to a party in New York, and inevitably the craziest person there is a psychiatrist. I mean the person who is literally doing childish antisocial things, making a fool of himself and embarrassing everyone else...