A Sojourn into the Stephen King Archive: ‘The Dark Half’

Typescript drafts on view in the newly opened archive reframe the horror maestro’s relationship with his alter ego, Richard Bachman.

By Andy HagemanFebruary 23, 2026

• SF

“WHAT IS THAT? What’s down there?”

I overheard an electrical technician say this as he peered into the dark space beneath the ventilation grille his coworker had just dislodged from the floor. Anywhere else, this might have been an unremarkable scene, but today the architectural mystery was unfolding within an addition to Stephen and Tabitha King’s iconic home at 47 West Broadway in Bangor, Maine.

I was sitting at a table 15 feet away, examining King’s handwritten edits on the typescript draft of The Gunslinger (1982), the first novel in the Dark Tower series. It was September 23, my second day as a 2025 research fellow in the Stephen Edwin King Archive. The recently opened archive holds an array of original documents, ranging from typescript drafts of published works to correspondence and prototype cover designs. Researchers may apply to visit the archive by submitting a description of their relevant work and a detailed plan for how they intend to use the materials. While the archive also contains unpublished works by King, these remain private and unavailable for viewing.

Watching the workers explore the mystery beneath a grille brought to my mind the iconic painting on the first-edition dust jacket of King’s 1986 novel IT. What was down there? Not rats. Not a clown promising that we’d float. Not a burial ground. The technicians wondered aloud if it was a strangely placed crawl space, but a longtime King assistant shared that the archive was built atop the property’s former swimming pool. I found this gap between the filled-in pool (a grave-like image) and the functioning building an evocative parallel to the weird crawl space that my research inhabits—between ideas that once swam in King’s mind (and now rest in the archive) and his published books as readers know them. I began to think of the archive as a “paper sematary” where interred ideas still speak to, and through, researchers who enter and open themselves to listen.

When applying for archive access, I included on my proposed research agenda that I’d be exploring the typescript drafts of King’s complete Dark Tower series and those of several stories set in fictional Castle Rock, Maine. Seeing, holding, and smelling the oldest existing piece of paper on which Stephen King himself typed “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed” was a transcendent experience. Like Roland Deschain, I completed my Dark Tower sojourn and found myself filled with new perspectives and questions. But the file that absolutely captivated me was a typescript of the 1989 novel The Dark Half. Unlike any of the other drafts I examined, this one featured a series of Post-it notes that adhered to pages spanning the document, each with handwritten messages that capture the author’s mind at work.

These notes, combined with a title page and final resolution that differ dramatically from the published version, reveal the extent to which King was working through matters of identity and authorship when creating this novel, especially during a moment when he had recently been exposed as the author behind the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The archived typescript shows that King approached the processes of drafting and revising this novel as a real-time collaboration between himself and Bachman, whom he treated as an alter ego. The Dark Half was thus forged in a process of existential identity negotiation that transcended the limits of an individual author reflecting on and mourning the loss of his pseudonym. In light of this new evidence regarding the novel’s co-authored origins, The Dark Half merits renewed attention and analysis, whether you’re new to King’s work or what he refers to as a “Constant Reader.”

I’ve lifted the grille. Let’s see what’s down there.

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As the workers delved into the darkness below, I was examining the archive file titled “The Dark Half Typescript, Nov 3, 1987–Feb 28, 1988.”

Before starting this typescript, King had published five novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman: Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man (1982), and Thinner (1984). A bookseller named Steve Brown suspected, based on his careful attention to stylistic signatures, that King was the writer behind Bachman, and he found copyright information in the Library of Congress that proved this to be the case. In 1985, King collaborated with Brown to divulge publicly that Bachman was his pseudonym. This ended the freedom to create in different registers of bleakness and positivity that King could find through his double, and this loss was still fresh in his mind when he started writing The Dark Half.

The Dark Half follows an author named Thad Beaumont who writes literary fiction that doesn’t sell especially well. He also writes gritty and gory crime fiction under the pseudonym George Stark, and this work is much more commercially successful. This situation resembles, of course, Paul Sheldon’s dilemma in King’s 1987 novel Misery, but The Dark Half adds the pseudonym, whereas Sheldon published literary and romance novels under his own name.

When the novel opens, a journalist has discovered the truth of Beaumont’s pseudonym, and the author participates in a publicity photo shoot in a cemetery with a mock headstone for George Stark. But Beaumont’s doppelgänger will not rest in peace. Stark digs his way up and out of the mock grave, and the agon between author and pseudonym drives the rest of the novel. Is Stark a person, a projection, or something else? Beaumont grapples with these existential questions up to a final confrontation in which the author summons a host of sparrows that destroy Stark in a myriad of tiny beakfuls.

Sitting on the archive worktable, the single-sided typescript, through its sheer size, inspires a new perspective on the novel in progress. King produced this tall stack in just four months, likely while working on other projects, and the writing shines remarkably sharply for an early draft. One line on the cover page sets this draft notably apart from the published book: “By Stephen King and Richard Bachman.”

King keyed this co-author attribution onto the opening page in November 1987, framing his next four months of writing. As of 1989, the published book lists only Stephen King as author, and the following author’s note appears between the dedication and prologue: “I’m indebted to the late Richard Bachman for his help and inspiration. This novel could not have been written without him.” So King began the work with Bachman alive and fully co-authoring, but completed it with Bachman dead and demoted—disavowed, even, as co-author. On its surface, the published novel looks like King writing what he knew from his recent experience, yet the archive contains evidence of the depths he plumbed, co-writing into the unknown, working through what Bachman had meant to him as an author and a person.

If King had published The Dark Half as co-authored with Bachman, this would have been unique within his oeuvre. He has co-authored novels with Peter Straub, Richard Chizmar, and Owen King (his youngest son), but the closest he has come to joint authorship with Bachman is a pair of novels: Desperation and The Regulators. The former is attributed to King, and the latter to Bachman as a posthumously discovered manuscript. Published simultaneously in 1996, these novels feature hardcover dust jacket art that creates a unified image when the two are placed together. Entangled yet separated, these novels illustrate the significance of the author-pseudonym dynamics that crafted The Dark Half from inception through revision, and thus invite more rigorous returns to that site of literary production.

From the startling cover page, I began searching for pages marked with King’s handwritten edits. All of the other typescripts I examined in the archive include corrections, changes, questions, and King’s prompts to himself penned by hand on their pages. Dark Half’s typescript was different, however: it contained approximately 11 Post-it notes affixed to pages throughout, featuring handwritten remarks and questions, several with follow-up responses. Most focused on author-pseudonym concerns and self-referential narrative elements. All of the Post-its, with a 3M copyright dated 1987, had the same design: in all caps across the lower quarter of the note was the phrase “DO THIS OR DIE” with the “I” in “DIE” replaced by an image of a falling bomb with tailfins up, tip pointed down. It’s fascinating that King, or King and Bachman together, chose such an aggressive, threatening design for this anomalous method of making notes for revision, intensifying the existential tone of their handwritten contents.

The Post-its make for compelling reading, but it’s up to the archive researcher to analyze them. One step I’ve taken in this endeavor is formulating possible scenarios for their production: 

• Stephen King wrote the notes.
• King wrote the notes as Richard Bachman.
• King and Bachman each wrote part of the notes, especially those with two distinct parts.
• King and Bachman co-wrote the notes, however we imagine their reality and relationship.

All of these scenarios present complex and ambiguous possibilities. Authorship and identity become fluid and the author(s) of The Dark Half tangle and tussle with their meaning inside the intellectual crawl space the notes create. My approach is to apply one or more of the scenarios to the protean King-Bachman dynamics inscribed in each of the Post-it quotes. In the following sections, I examine a selection of Post-its that display an array of King’s and Bachman’s approaches to identity negotiation. The note-by-note format aims to replicate the archive experience of moving through the typescript and finding one evocative utterance after another.

One of the earliest notes, which appears on page 19 (a suggestive number within King’s long-running numerology), begins an overt conversation between the novel in progress and the King-Bachman dynamics, focusing on how convoluted the novel makes the process of uncovering Beaumont’s pseudonym: “The following nine pages are unnecessary—when what’s his name uncovered Bachman, all he did was get the copyright from L.C.—that’s all this guy needs to do—or would—he’s not stupid.”

Set off a bit from that first sentence, and written with a subtly different slant and profile to the letters, is a response that reads: “There’s an unpleasant tinge of whininess about this guy daring to reveal Thad’s pseudonym.”

The first statement opens with a neutral tone to suggest that the drafting process unfolded unfettered by King’s own experience with Bachman and Steve Brown. In this editorial mode, King brings a critical eye to the practicalities of the writer’s pseudonym being uncovered, where “L.C.” refers to the Library of Congress. Neutrality slips, however, with the phrase “what’s his name.” Did King (and Bachman) forget the name of the man who exposed the pseudonym, or is forgetting a form of wish fulfillment? Perhaps the baroque investigation process that emerged in the draft was influenced by a personal desire to portray the King-Bachman secret as cleverly executed. The Post-it writer seems to suspect this too when he closes the sentence with “he’s not stupid.” Is this King not letting himself get away with self-protection or pettiness? Is this Bachman snapping at King for embracing wish fulfillment? The second sentence feeds into the answering of these questions.

The phrase “unpleasant tinge of whininess” appears directed at both the drafted narrative and its writer(s). Maybe King was rebuking himself for letting personal feelings seep into the story, regretting that he exposed the depth of his own struggle with authorship and identity. Maybe Bachman is bullying King for displacing personal anger into effete complaints. The words “guy daring” underscore the emphatic tone, either calling out the author’s whininess or, perhaps, belying deeper anger with the real and fictional leakers of King’s and Beaumont’s pseudonyms. The archive fuels these possibilities but cannot deliver a definitive answer—we cannot access the moments of the files’ inscription, and I argue that those moments themselves were complex confrontations of identity that elided their writer(s). The notes embody the instability of working through self-analysis and wavering perspectives—their contents as condensed as an Ezra Pound couplet or a dream recounted to Sigmund Freud.

A later Post-it turns to the motivations an author might have for preserving their secrets: “Also, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would pay blackmail to preserve a pseudonym—unless an entire false life, plus bigamy, had been constructed.”

In this note, framed as a craft inquiry, King draws upon personal experience to improve the draft. “Bigamy” notably evokes family structures and legal conventions rather than prurient sexual fantasy. The note focuses on an author’s secret second family rather than the implications for the author’s preexisting family. Additionally, the blackmail factor also externalizes the issue, placing the threat of instability squarely upon an outside party. Anxiety about what the pseudonym means and produces for the writer and his family gets deflected. Notice, too, the omission of what the pseudonym unlocks for the author, such as creative diversity and fluid subjectivity. These inclusions and exclusions hint to us how King (and Bachman) looked at the arc of pseudonym dynamics—what it reveals about a writer, spouse, parent, person. More than a cheeky reflection, The Dark Half registers King and Bachman striving to extrapolate together the stakes of their life and work.

The final Post-it, 14 pages before the typescript’s end, seems to deliver a comprehensive assessment of the draft, as ambiguous as it is judgmental: “this self reference stuff is become cute, to say the least.”

Maybe King was wrapping up his editorial review by asking himself to dial back on self-reference, to cut some passages and subtilize others. Interpreted this way, the note gently questions whether the draft is too indulgent. Another interpretation imagines Bachman writing the note in a darker tone to excoriate King for being too soft with the motif, as if the cuteness obscured the existential gravity of their entwined identities. In both cases, the Post-it identifies doppelgängers as crucial sites of authorial intensity and uncertainty. The accumulated eruptions of that motif unsettled King-Bachman just as the novel reached a version of its conclusion that was later buried in the paper sematary by the published book.

The published and unpublished conclusions to The Dark Half kill off George Stark in quite different ways. Shortly after that last Post-it in the unpublished draft, the pseudonym burns up in the author’s office with only Sheriff Pangborn witnessing his death:

Thad Beaumont’s study was an inferno. In it, a hazed, wavering phantom in the flames, was the burning body of George Stark. It had not attempted to follow him. It blundered about in the furnace instead, grabbing blindly for the sheets and scraps of manuscript. […] The corpse’s hand dropped. It sank to its knees. And then the head cast its eyes upon Alan Pangborn one final time. […] On the desk, Stark’s head was crowned with a diadem of flames.

Here, Stark catches fire as if he’s a paper antagonist—a piece of the manuscript whose flaming pages he desperately tries to save. Beaumont is absent from the scene. Stark is responsible for his own demise, and the author doesn’t have to observe his immolation. By contrast, in the published novel, Stark dies at the beaks of a host of (psychopomp) sparrows that Beaumont called to the task.

At the core of these alternate endings is control. King and Bachman reflect on the control they did and did not have in their public exposure—the who, how, and when of their secret relationship being disclosed. As in the Post-its, the writers examine how the author-pseudonym dynamic unveiled and shaped the challenges to creative control, including control over the life one builds. The particularity of these struggles as they unfold in the different versions of this novel appeal universally because people relate to specific rather than abstract crises of identity and control. From the paper sematary of the archive, King’s negotiation with his alter ego facilitates new perspectives when reading not only The Dark Half but also the other Bachman books.

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Analyzing authorship and pseudonyms unsettles conventional notions of individual writers working in isolation. People write in conversation with others. I, for example, opened this essay with the technicians who influenced my research, and I will close with gratitude to Robin Furth, the Stephen King archivist. Robin has been a professional researcher for King, developing conversations with him to inform his writing for over two decades. Dark Tower fans revere her for the formidable series concordance she produced, and King dedicated his latest novel, last year’s Never Flinch, to Robin. I am still thinking through her original hand-drawn maps of Roland’s journey and the reference photographs of Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza in New York City that King asked her to produce when he was in the midst of that series. Robin’s creations along with my other Dark Tower discoveries are a “Tale from the Archive” for another day. It was a tremendous honor to work with Robin during previsit preparations and while in the archive.

As a final note, at the same time that I have been writing about his archive, King has been writing contributions to an experimental novel currently being published by Benjamin Percy as a sequence of newspapers called The End Times. The byline attributes these articles’ authorship to the widow of the late Richard Bachman, Claudia Inez Bachman. Another voice, not Richard’s but that of someone who loved him, presents a new fold in the King-Bachman dynamic to savor and analyze, informed by this essay’s archive exhumation.

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Featured image: Photo of 47 West Broadway, Bangor, by Andy Hageman.