Thad Beaumont (Timothy Hutton) is a happily married family man with a successfully two-faced career as a writer. On the one hand, he publishes respected but poorly-selling scholarly works under his own name. It is under the name George Stark, however, that he sells millions of books with his signature strain of extremely violent action novels. When Thad makes the decision to write only under his own name, he stages a PR-friendly burial for his pen name which receives prominent media coverage. After this event, it's not long before townspeople somehow connected to Thad start turning up dead, with all clues pointing to the unassuming author. Is there a second party trying to frame Thad' Could the murders be somehow connected to the fragments of a undeveloped twin removed from Thad's brain when he was a boy' When the sheriff (Michael Rooker) finds Thad's fingerprints at the crime scenes, the unsuspecting author's life spins increasingly out of control. Director George Romero adapts frequent collaborator Stephen King's 1989 best-seller into a tight mainstream thriller with a fine dual performance from Hutton.