Word: beaumont
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
Texaco grew from one great gusher. In 1901 Joseph Cullinan, a former Standard Oil employee, found black gold on Spindletop Hill, near Beaumont, Texas. The next year he formed the Texas Co., and by 1928 it was operating in all 48 states. Texaco ventured overseas in 1936, when it teamed up with Standard Oil of California to market Middle Eastern oil. It also bought an interest in California Arabian Standard Oil, which held a major concession in Saudi Arabia. That company later became Aramco, a consortium that joined Saudi Arabia and American producers...
...lure instead of a drippy debutante; Ed Lauter as the nastiest newsman; Jack Wallace as a dumb, obsequious but likable cop; Deirdre O'Connell as the doomed hooker; and Jerome Dempsey as a chillingly venal mayor. Tony Walton's set deftly uses a 65-ft. depth on the Vivian Beaumont stage to convey a cavernous public building in Roman Preposterous style, and Willa Kim's costumes evoke the era without prettifying it. Yet what lingers is not the production's fidelity but its brilliant reconsideration...