Book Review: Rage

I've been a Stephen King fan ever since I watched The Stand miniseries on TV when I was in the fourth grade. Like, a freaky fan. When I was in the eighth grade, I did a book report on The Tommyknockers. I am a sick, sad individual and I love me some Stephen King.

This year has kind of been the Year of the King for me. In addition to one of his best books ever coming out (11/22/63), I got a Stephen King bobblehead at Stephen King bobblehead night with the Lowell Spinners and I saw his speak at UMass Lowell earlier this month. This is a year after we went to Colorado on vacation and took a tour of the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park - aka the hotel on which the Overlook Hotel from The Shining is based and the one where the miniseries version of the novel was filmed.

Anyway, a few months ago, I came across a series by James Smythe at the Guardian, a fellow Kingophile who pledged to re-read every book chronologically. Frankly, I loved the idea. It appeals to both my love of Stephen King books and my obsessive-compulsive nature. Reading stuff I like AND doing so in a neat and orderly fashion. YES PLEASE. Plus I'll be able to read the things I missed over the years like, oh I don't know, the entire Dark Tower series.

I've been doing this for a few months now. I'm not as intense as Smythe, who is finishing them in a week. I have a full-time job that does not pay me to do this, plus I'm part of a book club which means reading other books plus - yeesh, book a week? By Stephen King? Good lord, there aren't enough hours in the day. But I'm plugging along and I just finished the fourth book.

The first three books in this project are standard King fare: Carrie, 'Salem's Lot and The Shining are all classics and ones I've read before. But the fourth is the first of the Richard Bachman series and the first book I've never read: Rage.

For those who don't know, Rage is about a teenage boy who takes a gun, kills two teachers and holds a classroom of students hostage for several hours. It is a dark book. There isn't telekinesis or vampires or ghosts to blame anything on; this is just a very sick and twisted boy. The book turns into a perverted Breakfast Club with Charlie Decker (the protagonist) and his hostages sharing traumas and embarrassments from their youth, embracing each other's struggles with abusive parents, confusing sexuality and issues related to popularity. Everyone eventually sympathizes with Charlie except for one boy who gets attacked by his fellow hostages and put into a catatonic state for his troubles.

This book is dark, as is the case with most of the Bachman books. But I was right in the middle of reading this book when the Newtown shootings happened, and the whole thing made me sick. Apparently, after this book came out in 1977, it had a couple of connections to real shootings. This freaked out Stephen King, who fought to have the book taken out of print and he won. I was only able to buy the book as part of an anthology with three other Bachman books.

I'm biased when it comes to anything penned by Stephen King but I have to say: I didn't like this book. It wasn't just the subject matter and the disturbing time I chose to read it, although that did affect me. No, it just felt like there wasn't a point to the matter. Rather than using this situation as a means to prove something else - the stupidity of high school cliques a la The Breakfast Club, the idea that everyone has had something crappy happen to them and we all have that in common, etc. - it just felt like this was a bunch of things that happened. I guess it does say something about Stockholm syndrome, but still. Nobody was all that sympathetic - not Charlie, in a sick and twisted way, and not even Ted Jones, who does nothing wrong technically - and therefore, in the end, I didn't care if everyone lived or died or what happened.


I used to think that Richard Bachman was created because Stephen King had been writing too quickly and his publishers didn't want to put out that many books by the same person in such as short period of time, and I think that's still sort of true. But the Bachman books are also so different. In the forward to this story, King talks about how much darker Bachman is, how he goes to a different place in his mind to write these stories, almost as though they're being written by someone else who just happens to live in his head. I see that now. The writing style is King, but the stories aren't. They're darker and the monster that haunts the characters isn't a ghoul but a person - a horrifying part of themselves or of humanity. And those are the scariest monster of all.