Slice Of Death

By John Skow

THE DARK HALF

by Stephen King

Viking; 431 pages; $21.95

Another Stephen King blood leaker is loosed upon the world, this one in a record first printing of 1.5 million copies. The ghost of Gutenberg, calling feebly for beer from the gridiron of some Germanic hell, must be wondering whether movable type was really a good idea.

That is snobbery, of course, and a reader addicted to another sort of trash -- detective stories, say -- must distrust his instinct to ridicule horror novels. But in each genre there is good trash and bad trash, and King's does not seem very good. Mention this to a fan -- young, intelligent, well read -- and the reply is the same as is heard, above the level of pop lit, when one more dismal fiction by Joyce Carol Carol Oates appears: "Yes, but you should read the early books."

In his new thunderation, the first of four in a reported $30 million to $40 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.

No 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 to sex.

As 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 "he writes so well."