Hello everyone and welcome to the Stephen King cast, one man's musings on the works of Stephen King.

Each week I'll review one entry in the bibliography of Stephen King and the chronological order of publication.

And this week I analyze a novel that I point to as an example of King's most prolific year

that saw him publish a serial novel once a month for a period of six months and finished it off with the release of two full-length novels on the same day.

The two novels are mirror images of each other, recognizable in some ways, but utterly different, as if two writers had a similar idea but completely different writing styles and approaches that took the story in different directions.

The novel that I'm reviewing right now is actually not by Stephen King, but instead a found manuscript of the late author Richard Bachman, author of The Long Walk, the Running Man, and Thinner.

Thankfully, this manuscript was found by his widow who brought it to all of us.

Coincidentally enough, it turns out that Stephen King was simultaneously writing a very similar

novel that managed to find a release on the exact same day.

For those of you who don't know in the 1980s, Stephen King had a pseudonym by the name of Richard Bachman,

an alter ego that wound up inspiring the events of 1989's The Dark Half.

The existence of Richard Bachman had come about when King was told that he couldn't publish more than one book a year.

This, combined with his desire to explore if he could get books published under a different name,

caused him to write a series of novels under the Richard Bachman persona.

The Bachman books were very much the antithesis of the King novel, where King largely focused on the belief that people are ultimately good and can overcome all obstacles,

usually a supernatural threat,

when they embrace each other, Bachman explored the worst aspects of humanity in stories that were very unsupernatural,

until he released thinner, which would mark his last entry as Richard Bachman, until the 1996 release of the regulators, that is.

If you listen to my reviews of Insomnia, the Green Mile, and Desperation, you'll know that

I found this stretch of King's career his most imaginative.

In 1996, from March through August, we were treated to King's monthly installment of the Green

Mile, and in September, we witnessed the dual

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