Dave's Market

Dave's Market is a small neighborhood store near the Beaumont house and the setting for a pivotal phone call: while buying soda and snacks, Thad Beaumont recognizes George Stark on the line and hears his demand for a new novel. The everyday errand becomes a point of contact between the ordinary world and Stark’s escalating threat.

Setting and Use

Dave's Market is described as a mom-and-pop store about a mile and a half from the Beaumont house. It serves as a convenient alternative when a trip to the supermarket in Brewer feels like too much trouble. Its familiar, unexceptional role makes the intrusion of Stark’s call especially stark: Thad has gone there for Pepsi, chips, and dip, not to meet an adversary.

The Call from Stark

The call comes on a Friday evening, June 10, two days after Stark had called previously. A state trooper accompanying Thad waits outside while he shops. Inside, as Thad considers the available dips, the telephone rings; the employee behind the counter answers, listens, and passes the phone to him. Thad has anticipated the caller before taking the receiver, and the scene marks a contrast with the fear and anger he felt during the earlier call.

Standing beside a lottery computer displaying a four-million-dollar jackpot, Thad greets Stark by name. Stark answers in a voice whose Southern accent remains but whose affected country-bumpkin manner is absent. The conversation is presented as a more direct exchange between the two writers, with the disguise in Stark’s speech dropped.

The Ultimatum and Significance

Stark tells Thad that it is time to begin a new book, specifically another Stark novel. Thad refuses. Stark responds with a threat, saying he has been drawing Thad a picture and warning him not to make him draw it on Thad. The call therefore turns the store’s ordinary telephone into the means by which Stark brings his demand into Thad’s everyday surroundings.

The scene connects the invented crime-writing identity to a real coercive demand. Earlier, Thad had explained that he chose the name George Stark as a separate identity to help break his writer’s block, drawing inspiration from the pen name Richard Stark and the hard-edged criminal fiction associated with it. At Dave's Market, that once-useful separation has become a confrontation: Stark now demands that Thad create another book under the identity that has acquired an independent and dangerous presence.