Nearly half a century after his first
book hit the shelves Richard Bachman is finally getting his due. This fall two
much anticipated cinematic adaptations of his novels are hitting the big
screens. Francis Lawrence's The Long Walk debuted this past September to
mostly positive reviews and solid box office. Next month Edgar Wright is
bringing to the silver screen The Running Man which looks to be a far
more faithful adaptation than the 1986 version with Arnold Schwarzenegger and
Richard Dawson.
As an admirer of his work I find it
both shocking and simultaneously completely unsurprising that it has taken so
long for Bachman's work to finally make it to theaters. The shocking part is
that Bachman, as the world had known for more than forty years, was the
pseudonym of Stephen King without the question the author whose work has been
adapted for film, TV and even Broadway. Indeed I've lost count of how many
times some of his novels have been made and remade: I can't tell you what
number version of Carrie Mike Flanagan's limited series is going to be.
(To be clear I'm looking forward to it though not as much as Welcome to
Derry which will be debuting on HBO on October 26th.)
The unsurprising part is that for much
of my life I've thought Bachman's work – as opposed to King's - was basically unfilmable in even an
unconventional way. It's not for the reasons I think King's work has been better
served by television then film: King's novels are so dense that I think only
mini-series and limited series are almost always the only way to do justice to
it. Bachman's novel, by contrast, are
relatively short. The paperback. Indeed when King released The Bachman Books
in one collection those four books took up just under 700 pages. By
contrast the expurgated version of The Stand is 830 pages
hardcover. (I have both on my bookshelf, so I know.)
It's not the length that I thought was
the major obstacle but the tone. No one will ever accuse King of being in being
the voice of optimism in the novels and stories he writes but as someone who
has read pretty close to all of them multiple times by the end of the journey
of the majority of them, there's at least some hope at the end. King was never
the kind of horror novelist like Nick Cutter or Christopher Pike (to name just
two): where there are either no survivors at the end or those who do envy the
dead. He's bleak but he's not that bleak.
Bachman's books, by contrast, all
basically end with the protagonist either dead, insane or closing it on it. In
almost every case you could be forgiven for thinking if his journey was
meaningless given that either nothing has changes or things have gotten worse.
Based on what I have heard the endings of both Long Walk and Running
Man have been changed (with King's permission) for that very reason. I'll
have to wait to see both films for myself (and I will) but when I review them
one factor won't be that change.
Also in the case of Richard Bachman's
novels, with one real exception of the 'seven' he wrote, none of them fit the
category of horror King is best known for. When it comes to the first four –
which will be the underlying purpose of this brief series – that part was a
large factor as to why King chose to use a pseudonym in the first place.
The purpose of this series of articles
will be to look at the four novels of Richard Bachman, known as The Bachman
Books. And in order to explain that
we have to try and understand why King wrote as Bachman in the first place. So
in the introduction I'll explain – or in some cases let King do that for me –
why he chose to use Bachman as his pseudonym, why he chose to stop and why in
my case I only consider the first four novels he wrote as Bachman real Richard
Bachman books. (That doesn't mean I might not look at some of them in future
articles but one thing at a time.)
Much of what we know about Richard
Bachman comes, as you might expect, from the King himself. In an introduction to 'The Bachman Books'
titled 'Why I Was Bachman' written forty years ago King gives us the reasons,
perhaps in a more tongue-in-cheek fashion then usual. "People are asking
me why I did it and I don't seem to have very satisfactory answers. Good thing
I didn't murder anyone, isn't it?"
Like most novelists King wrote several
books before he sold his first novel: Carrie. According to him "two
were bad, one was indifferent and I thought two of them were pretty good. The
two I thought were pretty good were Getting It On (which became Rage when
it was published) and The Long Walk.) Both novels were written when King
was in college and if you know this fact, you will be equally astonished how
good they are. The former is flawed but the latter is sublime. But he couldn't
sell either.
King became a horror novelist almost
by accident. It didn't really happen until after his second novel Salem's
Lot. By 1977 King was basically known for horror and his publisher was
loathe to publish any novels that were not of the brand. He dances around it
for a while in the essay and then gives what is probably an honest answer:
"I think I did it to…do something
as someone other than Stephen King. I think that all novelists are inveterate
role-players and it was fun to be someone else for a while – in this case,
Richard Bachman.
And King went out of his way to develop
a personality and a history for him. (I can't think of any writer but King
who would go in such detail to develop a backstory for his pseudonym.)
Bachman was a fairly unpleasant fellow
who was born in New York and spent about ten years in the merchant marine
before joining the Coast Guard. He ultimately settled in rural New Hampshire,
where he wrote at night and tended to his medium-sized dairy farmer during the
day. He was married to Claudia Inez Bachman, and they had one child a boy, who
died in an unfortunate accident at the age of six (he fell through a well cover
and drowned.. Three years ago, a brain tumor was discovered near the base of
his brain; tricky surgery removed it. And he died suddenly in February of 1985
when the Bangor Daily News, my hometown paper, published the story that I was
Bachman – a story which I confirmed.
Now Bachman hasn't quite died: he has
in fact published two more novels The Regulators in 1996 and Blaze in
2007. Still ever since King has argued
that when Bachman died he passed away from 'cancer of the pseudonym'.
King admits that part of this was a
compromise with his publishers and that Bachman was a compromise. His metaphor
is typical King. His 'Stephen King publishers were 'a frigid wife' who only
wants to put out twice a year, encouraging her horny hubby to find a call girl.
Bachman was where I went when I had to have relief." (Hey, it was the
1980s and I'm pretty sure King was on cocaine most of that decade.)
Now its worth noting that until
Bachman's last 'real book', all four of Bachman's novel were published to almost
no fanfare or critical acclaim. As King himself admits this was an attempt to
find if he could right 'straight fiction' a question that he was asked over and
over throughout the early stages of his career. The irony is King did do
that as Bachman – and nobody read the book. Indeed King admitted he went out of his
way to make sure that these novels were issued with no fanfare. I'm not sure if
King's description of what the publishing industry was like half a century ago
has any truth to it today but when he describes one genre as 'just plain books'
he's not wrong about how little they've changed. Backlist books with new covers
(basically reprints of classics) genre novels (gothics, romances, westerns and
so on) and series books (I think we all the type. Every now and then you find
genuine novels buried deep within the sub-stratum and as King points out
much of the time this is done by authors writing under deep cover. "Donald
Westlake writing as Tucker Coe and Richard Stark; Evan Hunter under Ed McBain,
Gore Vidal under Edgar Box. (You can decide for yourself how Anne Rampling fits
into this.).
The interesting fact about Bachman was
that King was turning him, very gradually, into a horror novelist. Thinner, the
last 'official' Bachman book was meant to be followed by a 'rather gruesome suspense
novel called Misery' and I think that one might have taken 'Dicky' onto
the bestseller list."
However by that point a Washington
bookstore clerk and writer got suspicious went to the Library of Congress and
uncovered King's name on one of the Bachman copyright forms." (You got to
hand it to the 1980s; you actually had to do the work to expose someone's
secrets.) King wanted an answer to the question that I suspect all of us ask at
some time – is it work that takes you to the top or is it all just a lottery?
He says it was never answered but then
shows his work:
"But the fact that Thinner did
28,000 copies when Bachman was the author and 280,000 (in the immediate aftermath)
when Steve King became the author, might tell you something, huh?
I'm going to withhold my opinions of Bachman's
first four novels for their own reviews but I will tell you my opinion of Thinner,
of which I have a personal connection with. It's the first novel of King
that I ever read from start to finish. (What does it say about me that the
first Stephen King novel I read wasn't written by Stephen King?) I've forgotten
what I thought about the first time. I've reread a few times since then and
I'll be honest: by the standards of King or Bachman I don't think it's
the best work of either.
This is really the only novel of
Bachman's where I can truly see King underneath, poking his head up
occasionally. (I'll explain why his 'last two' don't below.) And honestly you
get the feeling King is trying to get caught in a way he wasn't with the four
previous novels. For one thing one of his characters actually says outright
"You were starting to sound like a Stephen King novel." These days it would be nothing. In 1985 it was
a tell as King was increasingly starting to have characters with his name in
his own books. (Usually he referred to himself as Edwin King.)
I'll grant you the format is well
done, particularly how many of the chapters tell how much Billy Halleck the
title character now weighs, giving us the sense of impending doom as the number
continues to drop. But that was a
gimmick not uncommon to King's own work at the time: the slow and genuine sense
of dread that the world was beginning to unravel and have a supernatural core
at the center. King would eventually
improve at this part of his writing but in the 1980s he was far better when the
threat was external, such as within the small towns in Maine most of his
novels even then inhabited or the movement of the plague in The Stand. In this novel Billy Halleck is trying to
convince everyone around him about the supernatural threat and he's basically
ignored by almost everyone during the book.
Trying to put myself in the head of
someone who in the 1980s had read both King novels and Bachman novels (a very
small niche I grant you but let's pretend they existed) I can't help but think
that this is a fusion of two great tastes that really don't go together. It
doesn't feel like Richard Bachman is experimenting with a new genre so much as
it is that King is workshopping a new format of his approach to horror. And either
way it takes a lot of time to get started on the journey, longer still to get
involved in a climax (of which it's worth noting Halleck basically learns about
secondhand and is basically appalled by what is done in his name) and ends with
a note of despair that makes you feel like the whole journey was pointless.
This could be expected of Bachman's novels, I admit, but I have to tell
you if I had been following Bachman I would have thought this was a
dangerous way to go as a writer.
Honestly reading Thinner doesn't
remind me so much of King but his contemporaries like John Saul and so many
writers to come. By the time you get finished with the book you feel depressed
and as if you've wasted your time reading these novels which end with everybody
you knew dead and evil triumphing. I've never had any real use for those who
like that brand of fatalism in their horror; there's enough of this in real
life for me to not to want to see in fiction.
And considering how close this novel came out in relation to Pet
Sematary, a novel so bleak King didn't want to publish it originally, I'm
kind of shocked he had Bachman end his first horror novel with an ending that
is just as bleak in its implications. (If you haven't read Thinner I
won't spoil it for you but if you have read Pet Sematary you
almost certainly know what I mean.)
The two Bachman publications that
followed the death of Bachman are interesting. The Regulators is an
alternate version of Desperation (both novels were released the same day
and if you put the hardcovers back-to-back the illustrations complete each
other.) The names of every single character in Desperation is used for
characters in Bachman's book with a few exceptions as well as some spouses. (It
is conceivable I'll review one or the other later on so I won't spoil it yet.)
At the time The Regulators was
considered inferior to Desperation, which is one of the best novels King
would write in the 1990s. I actually find what King/Bachman was trying to do
interesting as a writer: he was essentially creating an alternate universe where
all of these characters led different lives. Considering how much of this is
now part of quantum theory and fiction itself, it's a fascinating experiment in
fiction that actually is more readable then most of these kinds of experiments
are. And it unfolds in a style vastly
different from what King had done before, with much of the novel being told
through journal entries, letters and scripts of fictional TV and movie series
both of which King was always good at it.
And as a standalone it works far better
than Thinner does or for that matter some of King's other work both during
this period and after. I will acknowledge
that both the climax is unsettling and the denouement confusing (thirty years
later I still don't know what its supposed to mean about the fate of the
central characters) but that's something you could say of much of King's work
as a whole.
Blaze which came out in 2007 was actually
supposed to be a Stephen King novel. After the success of Carrie he had
two books in reserve. Salem's Lot and Blaze. His publisher told
him the former was the better novel and Blaze was essentially unpublished.
People knew of its existence (I knew details in The Stephen King Encyclopedia
as early as 1993) but it had never seen print until 'Bachman's version came
out. In all honesty that was the right choice: Blaze is far more
stylistically similar to the Bachman Books both in style and mood. Thematically its similar to how King retells
classic novels: Blaze is basically his version of Steinbeck's Of Mice
& Men much like Salem's Lot would be a reinterpretation of Dracula.
Considering how many people have
tried to do versions of both works, it's hard to begrudge him that.
Now that I've told you all this, what
do I think of Bachman's novels? That's going to be the purpose of the reviews I
write of The Bachman Books. What I will say is that I'm pretty sure if I'd
been that imaginary reader I talked about and I'd learned that King and Bachman
were one and the same, my first reaction would have been: "You're shitting
me, right?" Because I know that
they were written by the same hand but until Thinner basically gives the
game away based on the prose alone I would not have picked up on it. It has nothing to do with the difference
between horror and 'mainstream fiction'. By now I've read so many other authors
that can shift between genres with ease and I can recognize certain stylistic
tricks. Sometimes its with those who write for both young adults and 'mature
audiences', sometimes its with authors who switch genres in either style; I can
tell an author's style when I read it either way.
When it comes to The Bachman Books I
can't really. I'll grant you there are some themes in each novel that are
occasionally reminiscent of King's work but most of them are so universal that
they could just as easily have been written by anybody. And Bachman does have a
different command of a phrase that is stylistically different from King's both
in narration, pace and mood. Nor is there even an attempt as King was becoming
known for even then, to build a common universe between them. The Long Walk could
very well exist in the same world The Running Man does but at no point
does Bachman/King even give a hint this
is the case. To be sure during that
period there was a divide between those who wrote 'stand-alone novels' and the
series that King's talks were part of the paperbacks that doesn't exist today
but that in its own way speaks to Bachman's style. It might have been easier
for him to breakthrough as a novelist if he had; Bachman never tries.
I'll deal with my opinions of Bachman's
work in the reviews but I will say this. I think if we had never known that
Stephen King was Bachman The Long Walk and The Running Man still
should have been turned into big budget films. They are quality works and I
think if 'Bachman' had the right kind of publicity, they'd have been
bestsellers well before then.
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