Stephen King Writing As Richard Bachman: Rage (1977)

 

We may never know one way or the other but there's an argument that Rage, the first novel King published under his pseudonym may have sold the poorest of any book King ever wrote.

It's not merely because almost no one bought any of 'Bachman's' novels when they were under his name. It's that when the truth came out about Bachman, all of King's books under that label were published first in an omnibus volume and then only in the mid-1990s did they begin to get released individually. And then outside events intervened that lead to the author essentially pulling the book from the shelves voluntarily.

You see Rage is about a high school named Charlie Decker who on a bright May morning has a mental breakdown. It's been a long time coming as he admits. He's called to the office by the principal Mr. Decker, who talks to him about his most recent psychiatric evaluation. Decker tries to be polite about but then Charlie starts to 'get it on' which as we will learn is to mentally dress down an authority figure in the meanest possible terms and with vulgar language. Decker reacts like any principal should and expels him. This is Charlie's reaction:

I went down the staircase whistling. I felt wonderful. Things happen that way sometimes. When everything is as its worst, your mind just throws it all into the wastebasket and goes to Florida for a while. There is a sudden electric what-the-hell glow as you stand there looking back over your shoulder at the bridge you just burned down.

He then goes to his locker, takes out his father's pistol and his bullets. Then he goes back to his classroom and shoots his algebra teacher.

After the shootings at Columbine King voluntarily had Rage pulled from all bookstores which as we all know ended school shootings forever.  The truth is King no doubt this as a preemptive strike. For his entire career even then his novels always were being put on 'banned books' lists because of their violence and language (as they still are basically to this day.) Rage was no more responsible for all of the shootings that had happened before that horrible event then those who would eventually try to blame films such as The Basketball Diaries immediately afterward. But King had to know that this would be something that those on the right (who had less influence over censorship back then but it was still significant) would use as a cudgel to get all of his books off the shelfs and do everything to destroy his career in the future. Besides this was an easy sacrificial lamb compared to others that were far more worthy of it.

So the only way you can get Rage in the 21^st century is either if you find a copy of the book at a used book stores or more likely if you can find the omnibus collection on eBay or other places. Now I've had the latter for decades obviously, so let me tell you some more details.

First Rage is almost certainly the first book King ever wrote. He started  it while still a teenager, either 18 or 19 depending on his telling of the story. "At one point I found it moldering away in the cellar of the house I grew up in – this rediscovery was in 1970 and I finished it in 1971." This book, like The Long Walk, was one of two very early novels he wrote before Carrie ended up being published that he thought was 'pretty good'. In fact under the title Getting It On Doubleday had almost bought it and published it two years before Carrie was sold. So it became the first book he submitted as Bachman in 1977. It was released, like all of the first four Bachman books, without fanfare and sold just as badly.

Now I've read it multiple times over the years. It does not, as King himself referred to it in 'Why I Was Bachman' "suck like an Electrolux" but honestly its not very good King or even very good Bachman. The Long Walk reads far better, is more tightly written and does a better job getting into the head of Ray Garraty, who's the same age as Charlie Decker. Rage, by contrast, is uneven and rambles too much.

Part of the problem is Charlie just isn't that interesting a character. He ends up telling his story to his classmates as part of his 'defense' for what he does but there are times even he acknowledge its not that interesting a story.  The reason he claims to have done everything he did is because of how bad his father was. "My dad has hated me for as long as I can remember'. The thing is we never get a clear reason why because the novel's entirely from Charlie's perspective. He served in World War II and he was clearly proud of doing so and he doesn't seem happy to be a recruiting chief for the Vietnam War. And he is abusive to his son at times but not in a particularly original way.

Honestly Charlie's grievances are so small: his father yells at him and hits him after he breaks the windows of the car, he hates wearing a corduroy suit his mother gives him at 12 and has to wear it to a birthday party (by that point his father doesn't even talk to him, he has a terrible sexual experience at sixteen, finally he takes a pipe wrench to school and finally nearly kills one of his teachers.  'Bachman' really only seems interested in what's happening in the present and not what made Charlie who he was.

When King first wrote the novel he was a teenager in the 1960s when the Vietnam War was going horribly and the generational clash that to this day shapes every aspect of our American experience was going on. Its praiseworthy that he tries to put us in the heads of his fellow teenagers and to do so in an act of violence might be a good way to do it. But Charlie doesn't come across as that interesting a protagonist or an antihero. There's no good reason for Charlie being who he is – he's basically a stick figure.

If Rage had ever been done in any other medium (which it almost certainly never will be) it probably would have worked better as a play.  In the hardcover its barely 125 pages long and it basically unfolds over an hour and a half from the moment Charlie is excused from class to the end of the hostage situation. And since it's also basically set in a high school and the majority of it a classroom, it would almost certainly work dramatically better.  

The main reason that I actually think King was premature in removing Rage from the shelves is that its actually improved with age in many ways. I'm not talking about the shooting in the school, I'm talking about how it gets the core of so many of the problems driving teenagers that are nevertheless true; the loneliness, the desire to conform, the way they all seem frustrated. And that's what actually makes Rage work.

After Charlie shoots his homeroom teenager none of his fellow students react:

Nobody said a word. They sat in utter stunned silence, looking at me attentively, as if I had just announced I was going to tell them how they could all get passes to the Placerville Drive-in this Friday night.

They barely manage dull surprise when Charlie says: "This is known as getting it on.

Nobody said anything for five minutes…They looked at me, and I looked at them. Maybe they still could have bolted and they're still asking me why they didn't. Why didn't they cut and run, Charlie? What did you do to them…I don't answer any questions about what happened in Room 16. But if I told them anything, it would be that they've forgotten what it's like to be a kid, to live cheek-in-jowl with violence…

I'm just telling you that American kinds labor under a huge life of violence, both real and make-believe…I knew they thought they'd be all right. That's part of it. What I wonder about it is this: Were they hoping I'd get somebody else?"

No one can look at so much of what teenagers, both in this country and around the world, are living through and not realize how dead on that statement still is in 2026. That King wrote this thirty years before social media and active shooter drills were become the norm for the average teenager is yet another example where King/Bachman saw the future without meaning to.

The only person who honestly seems to think that something horrible is going on is Ted Jones, the most popular kid in high school. Everyone else seems to almost be having a good time from the start, they're fine if he's smoking, one actually asked if he can do homework.

Charlie acknowledges to one of the students that he's nuts but he can't explain why. "If I knew what was making me do it, I problem wouldn't have to." What Charlie can't explain is why everyone in the room is almost immediately on his side. He's actually shocked when they start to turn on Ted, who's the only one who wants to end the violence.

One of the sequences that is the most powerful in the book comes when Don Grace, the school shrink tries to talk Charlie down. He tells Grace that the next time he asks a question he will shoot someone. This leads to a four page tour de force. Done entirely in short sentence in which Charlie engages in a back and forth that eventually tricks Grace into asking a question by quoting the bible and finally causes him to walk away utterly broken.

What's more frightening is after this the classroom erupts in joy, which he describes as on the outside as something unsettling.

Very early in the novel Charle basically states his thesis about the universe and that he thinks for most part it is sane orderly and logical. But:

The other side says that the universe has all the logic of a little kid in a Halloween cowboy suit with his guts and his trick or treat candy spread all over a mile of Interstate 95. This is the logic of napalm, paranoia, suitcase bombs carried by happy Arabs, random carcinoma. This logic eats itself. It says life is a monkey on  a stick, it says life spins as hysterically and erratically as the penny you flick to see who buys lunch.

No one looks at that side unless they have to, and I can understand that. You look at it if you hitch a ride with a drunk in a GTO who puts up to 110 and starts blubbering about how his wife turned him out ; you look at it if some guy decides to drive across Indiana shooting kids on bicycles; you look at it if your sister says, "I'm going down to the store for a minute, big guy" and then gets killed in a stickup.

It's a roulette wheel, but anyone who says the game is rigged is whining. No matter how many numbers there are, the principal of that little white jittering ball never changes. Don't say its crazy, it's all so cool and sane.

And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. Its in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms.

I find it impossible to argue with that logic and anyone who thinks otherwise is as crazy as Charlie knows he is.

Charlie uses this statement right after shoots his algebra teacher to make it very clear he knows that he's insane and that by contrast proves his sanity. He can't explain what happens next, how the teenagers with a feud turn on each other and then decide to become friends, how everybody begins to share secrets that even horrify Charlie. Finally he realizes something horrible:

At times I was almost tempted to feel (foolish conceit) that I was holding them by myself by sheer willpower. Now I know, of course, that nothing could have been farther from the truth. I had one real hostage that day and his name was Ted Jones.

The real horror in Rage is not the violence that Charlie invokes upon the faculty but that comes in the real climax of the novel. It is something that is genuinely horrific and can't be explained by such things as Stockholm Syndrome. It's so unsettling that Charlie doesn't describe it himself in the book and almost feels compelled to comfort Ted after its happened. We know in the aftermath of the horrors of that day that Charlie has been institutionalized and all of the teenagers seem to have gotten through their experience completely fine with no signs of trauma. And why should they? Charlie was never the real cause of it.

I'm relatively certain in my lifetime, certainly not King's that Rage will ever be on library shelves or available in a new edition. The thing is, if you realty want to understand just how crazy the world is today, reading 'Bachman's' first novel might give you some insight. It won't explain the nightmare that unfolds with Charlie and his classmates but if we realize that at some basic level those problems with teenagers have always been there, that the craziness of life is just below the surface and that all of us are just one little thing away from exploding then there's an argument we need to read it.

And as we all know there are still Charlie Deckers in our world and our society is no more prepared to understand them now then they were in 1999 or in 1977. The only real difference is that there's a place in the world where they're accepted for who they are. That being said Charlie Decker would have no use for Andrew Tate or those in the manosphere. They'd be too close to Ted Jones for his liking.