While Clawson, later killed in a brutal and bloody manner by the physical manifestation of George Stark, is fictional, he is based on a real person in King’s life. Several years before the release of The Dark Half, a book clerk named Steve Brown made the exact same sort of connection as Clawson. After reading the Richard Bachman novel Thinner in 1984, Brown came to draw comparisons between Bachman and King that led him on a trail of research all the way to the Library of Congress to search through copyright documents. With proof in hand that Stephen King was indeed Richard Bachman, Brown sent a letter to the novelist, asking if he could write an article on his literary discovery. Steve Brown described what happened next in his article “Bachman Exposed”:
Two weeks went by. Then I heard a page over the intercom at the big bookstore I worked in. “Steve Brown. Call for Steve Brown on line five.” I picked it up and a voice said, “Steve Brown? This is Steve King. All right. You know I’m Bachman. I know I’m Bachman. What are we going to do about it? Let’s talk.” We chatted for a while and he gave me his unlisted home phone and told me to call him in the evening. I ran out and got a tape recorder with a telephone attachment and interviewed him for three nights straight over the phone. He was very relaxed and very funny throughout. He didn’t seem at all upset that I had found him out. He was extremely gracious and said that he wouldn’t talk to anyone else but me (outside of simply admitting it), that mine would be the only lengthy interview on the subject. It took a while for me to get it in shape and find a publisher. During this time King kept in contact and told me that more and more people had read Thinner and were coming after him. Finally, I published it in the Washington Post. From there, it went everywhere.2
While Steve Brown is quick to point out that he never “cashed in” on the reveal, Frederick Clawson is not so moral. He pays dearly for his blackmailing plot when George Stark, an amalgam of Thad and Alexis Machine, visits with a straight razor.
The “birth” of George Stark, a physical rendering of a concept who comes to life to seek violent revenge, occurs in the dirt of the Castle Rock cemetery. Or so it seems. At the beginning of The Dark Half, readers are clued into a significant event in Thad’s childhood. As a ten-year-old, Thad began to suffer from debilitating headaches which grew worse. He even described auditory hallucinations, specifically of birds flapping, to his terrified mother. Diagnosed with a benign brain tumor, which oddly grew bigger as he learned the craft of writing, Thad undergoes a surgery to relieve the headaches. What the doctors find in little Thad’s skull is so startling that a seasoned nurse drops a scalpel and shrieks. It becomes clear that in utero, Thad has absorbed his twin, a boy who will never live. The poor creature’s eyeball, somehow sentient, stares out at the surgeon from Thad’s brain before most of it is removed in haste.
Thad’s parents neglect to tell him about the true nature of his tumor, which he comes to understand later is the catalyst for the birth of George Stark. This naturally led us down the path of the scientific phenomenon of parasitic twins, prompting us to separate fact from fiction.
Chang and Eng Bunker pictured in 1874.
Chang and Eng Bunker both died on January 17th, 1874, at the age of sixty-two Chang died first, leaving Eng to linger for two hours, knowing his death would soon follow
Born in 1811, in what is considered modern-day Thailand, twin brothers Chang and Eng Bunker became “two of the nineteenth century’s most studied human beings.”3 Conjoined at the chest, the brothers were immediately considered ripe for the freak show market. Discovered in Siam by a British explorer, the young men were soon traveling the globe to the delight and fascination of audiences. The term “Siamese Twins” was then used for all twins born with fused body parts, until the more accurate term, conjoined twins, came about in the lexicon in the latter end of the twentieth century. To fully understand how unique conjoined twins are, one must study the numbers. Occurring only once between 49,000 to 189,000 births, about half of those are stillborn, while another 30 percent die within twenty-four hours.
Perhaps because of their inherent rarity, conjoined twins have garnered much attention, even appearing on reality television series Abby and Brittany (2012) in which Abby and Brittany Hensel give insight into their lives as Dicephalic Parapagus twins. This term is used to describe their conjoined nature, as sharing a torso and each inhabiting one head, one arm, and one leg. It is extremely rare for twins of this particular diagnosis to live past childbirth, Abby and Brittany being two of the lucky few.
While Chang and Eng lived full lives, as do Abby and Brittany as college graduates and school teachers, the focus of The Dark Half is on parasitic twins, when one of the conjoined twins is absorbed by their heartier partner in the womb, leaving behind body parts and nothing more. Of course, in the fictionalized account, this leads to murder and mayhem, in the true Stephen King fashion we’ve come to love.
So, what causes a parasitic twin to occur? According to Wikipedia:
Parasitic twins occur when a twin embryo begins developing in utero, but the pair does not fully separate, and one embryo maintains dominant development at the expense of its twin. Unlike conjoined twins, one ceases development during gestation and is vestigial to a mostly fully formed, otherwise healthy individual twin. The undeveloped twin is defined as parasitic, rather than conjoined, because it is incompletely formed or wholly dependent on the body functions of the complete fetus. The independent twin is called the autosite.
In The Dark Half, Thad is the autosite, and the remains of the twin in his brain, who later takes on the identity of his pseudonym George Stark, is the parasite. The 1989 novel, and its 1993 film version starring Timothy Hutton, are hardly the first or only appearances of such a phenomenon in media. The low-budget horror film Basket Case (1982) centers on Duane (Kevin VanHentenryk), who carries around his removed parasitic twin in a basket as he seeks his fortune in New York City. As you might have guessed, Duane’s deformed twin also has a hankering for mischief and murder! This same theme is also found in “Humbug,” a 1995 episode of The X-Files (1993–2018), when once again a parasitic twin, thought to have no autonomy, detaches from his autosite every night to feast on the unsuspecting denizens of a trailer park.
The reality is that babies born with parasitic twins in the modern era no longer have to endure a demeaning life in the freak show circuit. Because of knowledgeable surgeons and advances in both technology and societal understanding, children can have their extra appendages removed or altered so that they can live full, happy lives. But, while this is wholly possible, the surgeries needed to detach the autosite from their parasitic twin can be life-threatening. In the case of ten-month-old Dominique in 2017, her parasitic twin was not just an anomaly of physical appearance, it was risking her life by demanding too much blood from her small heart. Born with her twin’s waist, legs, and feet growing from her back, there was a strain on Dominique’s spine as well. From Côte d’Ivoire, Dominique was fortunate to receive help from a host family in the United States, where she was given a grueling surgery at the Advocate Children’s Hospital in Illinois. This complex procedure included consultation from over fifty physicians before it even began. As described to Ashley Strickland for CNN, this was not a rote task for the highly accomplished staff.