Book Review: Roadwork

Roadwork is the third of Stephen King's "Bachman books," the collection he published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It's not just that the name on the cover is different, however; the two men that wrote, say Rage and The Stand are two very different men, even if they live in the same head.

Bart Dawes, the main character in Roadwork, would understand that concept. Ever since the death of his young son Charlie of a brain tumor, Dawes own brain has been the home of two different personalities: George, a darker version of himself, and Freddy, a representative of Charlie that passes for his conscience. As the story goes on and Dawes falls deeper into a pit of depression and desperation, Freddy grows quieter, as though he's slowly killing what's left of Charlie and what's left of his own goodness.

While Dawes' decline started with Charlie's death, it is exacerbated by the impending installation of a new highway system that will be running right through his home and workplace, forcing him to relocate both. Except he does nothing to do that. He lies to his wife, Mary, and to his boss about finding a new home and a new factory in which to house the Blue Ribbon industrial laundry company. Instead he cashes in his life insurance policy, buys a couple of heavy-duty guns and squirrels away the evidence. His inaction is discovered, and he soon loses his wife and the only job he has ever known, sending him into a spiral of booze and television and darkness. Soon, the only people he can really open up to is a local crime boss named Sal and Olivia, a young co-ed hitchhiking her way to Las Vegas.

The more people tell him he has to move, to officially give up everything now that he's lost his son, wife, job, and house, the more he digs in and becomes desperate. He attacks the construction site with a carload of Molotov cocktails. He takes the city's settlement for his house and divides it between Mary and Olivia. And then he calls Sal for explosives. Lots of them.

I don't want to paint all the Bachman books with the same gray brush - after all, I really liked The Long Walk - but Roadwork is of the same ilk as Rage. There is nothing supernatural in this book; the Big Baddie is the city, or cancer, or fate, or the changing nature of middle age. Instead, like in Rage, we spend the book in the mind of someone deeply disturbed, driven to this point of violent desperation. In some ways, it's sad and you feel for Bart Dawes; if his son had lived, if the city had left him alone, how fulfilling or happy might his life had been? But I just found myself feeling bad for the innocent people he hurt with his actions. Mary also lost her son and house and marriage, but she's almost viewed as a villain because she mourned and then moved on in time. His inaction at the laundry cost a factory's worth of people their jobs. Even with Charlie/Freddy's voice begging him not to, he hurt people.

All of which made Dawes not entirely sympathetic and took away from my enjoyment of the book. Dawes isn't nearly as bad as Charlie Decker from Rage (hey, between these two books and Firestarter, we've got three Charlies. Quality name), whose reason for wanting to shoot up his school is because he has nothing better to do, but it's still a pretty extreme reaction. Stephen King wrote this book right after losing his mother to cancer and so was full of darkness and questions about the unfairness of it all himself; you can see where he's coming from. But it's almost as though his mother, through Charlie/Freddy, was telling him not to be so dark, as well. I have to say I agree.