George Stark—Alan Pangborn

George Stark—Alan Pangborn is a relationship shaped by Stark’s armed control of the sheriff and by Pangborn’s effort to protect the Beaumont twins without surrendering his judgment. Stark treats Alan as useful leverage, forcing him to conceal the danger and cooperate under threat; Alan’s compliance buys time for the children but does not make him Stark’s ally. After Stark is gone, the immediate danger ends, yet Alan cannot simply return to their former ease: he tells Thad that the experience has overwhelmed him.

From suspicion to captivity

Alan’s connection to Stark begins in a context of investigation rather than personal allegiance. Thad imagines aloud the elaborate explanation that might account for evidence implicating him: an identical twin could have stayed in Castle Rock, murdered Homer Gamache, and left fingerprints on the truck while Thad traveled elsewhere, killed Frederick Clawson, and returned to Ludlow. The scenario exposes the logic of the suspicion surrounding Thad, but it is presented as a speculative account, not as a genuine explanation. Alan’s direct encounter with Stark brings a different, immediate problem: the sheriff is alone in a house where Stark has the weapons and the power to decide what happens next.

Stark makes that imbalance explicit while the twins are being fed. He tells Alan that he can use him and asks whether the State Police sent him to investigate the house. Alan explains that Fuzzy Martin called; when Stark asks what he did after the call, Alan tells him that as well. Alan chooses truth because he believes Stark can detect a lie, and because his arrival alone already gives away much of what he has done. Stark approves of the answers and says they improve Alan’s chances of surviving. The exchange establishes the terms of their relationship: Stark evaluates Alan as a potential tool, while Alan measures what he can safely disclose.

A sheriff compelled to cooperate

Stark’s control extends beyond keeping Alan physically present. He directs him to make a telephone call and to present a misleading account, turning the sheriff’s official position into cover for Stark’s activity. After Alan hangs up, Stark praises the added detail about a key beneath the doormat. Alan answers with an insult, a small act of defiance that surprises him under the circumstances; it does not alter the fact that Stark is still controlling the encounter.

The danger behind this forced cooperation becomes explicit when Alan asks whether a remark about vapor-lock carried a coded meaning. Stark denies that it did, then warns Alan not to become clever at the twins’ expense. He threatens to harm one of the children if Alan tries to outmaneuver him, and uses William as the immediate focus of that threat. Alan responds that the conduct makes him nervous; Stark tells him to remain nervous. The children are therefore not incidental to the power struggle: Stark makes their safety the price of Alan’s obedience, while Alan must keep his responses measured to avoid provoking him.

Stark later renews the warning in terms of the whole household. He tells Alan not to be inventive and threatens that any attempted maneuver will end with everyone being brought out dead. Alan says he understands. Stark then sends him out and turns to Thad, signaling that the sheriff’s role in that stage of the confrontation is over. Alan has been made to comply, but the exchange does not show him accepting Stark’s authority as legitimate or abandoning his concern for the family.

Stark’s borrowed crime-fiction logic

The relationship carries an added irony because Stark’s identity grew from Thad’s decision to write under a separate name. Thad recalls choosing George Stark as an identity distinct from his own while struggling with writer’s block. The name drew on Richard Stark, the pen name Donald E. Westlake used for a series about Parker, a professional thief. Thad was especially struck by the character’s single-minded, almost mechanical pursuit of money, a model that also informed Alexis Machine, the central figure in the first and last George Stark novels.

That history gives Stark’s dealings with Alan a literary parallel without reducing them to fiction. Stark behaves with the directness and instrumental logic Thad associated with the crime novels: he assesses what a person can do for him, issues a demand, and backs it with force. The resemblance is not a claim that Alan and Stark share a criminal partnership. Rather, the sheriff is drawn into the kind of hard-edged criminal machinery that Stark’s fictional lineage evokes, with the crucial difference that the threats now govern the safety of real people, especially the children.

The aftermath and the loss of ease

After Stark’s defeat, Alan speaks with Thad about their relationship. Thad asks whether Alan once liked him and whether Alan now holds him responsible for what happened. Alan answers that he cares only that it is over. He explains that he has just seen a man carried into the sky by sparrows and asks Thad for a break. His response is not a simple declaration of lasting hostility: it registers exhaustion and the strain of what he has witnessed, while making clear that the ordeal has displaced whatever friendly feeling Thad remembers.

The relationship’s decisive movement is thus from a sheriff confronting an unexplained threat to a captive intermediary forced to manage Stark’s demands, and finally to an uneasy post-crisis encounter with Thad. Alan’s cooperation is bounded by the need to keep the twins safe; Stark never earns his trust. When the immediate danger passes, Alan’s blunt insistence that it is over offers no easy restoration of their former rapport. The sheriff has survived the confrontation, but the experience leaves him too overwhelmed to resume that familiarity at once.