Or, the book Stephen King doesn’t want you to read.
I certainly hadn’t, before tracking down a copy online. Rage has been out of print for years – it was last published as part of the Bachman Books collection in 1985. This is at King’s request, and after finally reading it, I can see why he chose that path. Rage is an ugly book about an ugly subject, written with a complete lack of social conscience and maturity. It is also riveting stuff.
Rage was the first novel (novella, really) written by King’s “dark half,” Richard Bachman. You may wonder why a writer of horror fiction needs a dark pseudonym. If so, you should read some of the Bachman books. We’ll be covering them all here, but these are the novels in which King lets loose, channeling the impulses he puts in check in works under his own name. It’s not an uncommon practice, and in fact Rage makes sly mention of one of the most famous practitioners, Donald Westlake, who wrote books about unrepentant bad guy Parker under the name Richard Stark.
In King’s case, Bachman is his outlet for gleefully irresponsible nightmares, stories in which the evil that’s always poking at the corners of his world is given free rein. I usually find myself engrossed in King’s stories, turning pages to find out what happens next. Bachman’s stories leave me with a sick pain in my gut, and a palpable fear of getting to the end, because I know it’s not going to turn out well.
Rage was the first, and King seemingly perfected that sickening style right away. It’s the story of Charlie Decker, a junior at Placerville High School in Maine, who decides one day to shoot two of his teachers dead and take a class hostage. He doesn’t quite know why he does this, but over the course of a few hours, he examines his own motivations and those of his classmates.
Within a few pages, it was clear to me that King is right to keep this out of print. The scenes of Charlie shooting his teachers are stomach-churning, the sequences in which Charlie talks with hostage negotiators are terrifying, and the ending, in which the students all gang up on one of their own and batter him into a coma, doesn’t justify the repulsive setup. It’s a completely irresponsible piece of work, wielding images of great power in service of nothing.
And yet… the writing here is alive, more alive than I can remember ever seeing from King. Descriptions breathe, Charlie’s inner monologue is astonishing, and King stays away from all of his clichéd writing tricks. There’s a little Holden Caulfield to the proceedings, but when King digs into events from Charlie’s home and school life, it’s stunning stuff. And when the situation starts to crumble around Charlie’s ears, it’s intense in a way a book like ’Salem’s Lot just isn’t.
The stakes are higher here, you see. This is truly dangerous material, and that high-wire act pumps life into King’s writing.
I wonder if he felt that while writing it. Rage is a book that pulses with real blood, one that comes from a place King could only visit under another name. Richard Bachman is that sick voice that lives in all of us, and whenever King slips into his clothes from now on, it will be to explore what it feels like to have this uncontrollable monster beneath one’s skin, to have depths one is terrified of sinking to. (He will most literally take on that theme in 1989’s The Dark Half.)
As for Rage, I’m not sure I ever want to read it again. I can only imagine how King feels, reading it now. It’s a sick little book, one that never earns its harrowing premise, but it’s captivating, and the writing leaps off the page in ways I’ve never seen from him. It’s an interesting paradox. Rage is the work of a young writer feeling his way around his conscience, hiding behind another name and letting his demons loose. It is a book without boundaries, and that freedom is both damning and liberating. It’s painful and powerful, so much so that its author has taken it back, scared of the force it commands. That alone makes it worth tracking down.
Next: The Shining
