The Science of Stephen King

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: