Stephen King - Rage
I'm reading all of Stephen King's fiction in publication order, and I've now reached the first of the Bachman books.
Rage is probably King's most notorious novel. It's been out of print for decades. It's about a teenager who brings a gun into school, shoots his teacher, and holds his class hostage, and through the 80s and 90s copies of it turned up in the lockers of real school shooters in the US. King asked his publisher to let it go out of print so that it couldn't inspire anyone else, which means it's now quite hard to get hold of.
This is my second time reading it. I first read it two years ago, and according to my reading spreadsheet I gave it a 6 out of 10. This time it's a 5. I couldn't remember anything about what I thought of it first time round, which is maybe a review in itself, so I dug out my reading journal from 2024. Here's what I wrote on the 13th of July:
Rage was good but not great. It doesn't read like King, probably due to being in first person, which is unusual for him, and in places it gets a bit incoherent and hard to follow. That may be intentional since we're in the head of a maniac who's decided to become a school shooter. There's something really unsettling about the way the other kids react to the shooting, in that they don't really react to it at all. They sit and talk with Charlie very casually, sharing stories about moments of sexual awakening. I guess there's some commentary on social attitudes post-Vietnam and the sexual revolution going on here that doesn't translate to the modern day, or at least I don't know enough about 1970s America to pick up on it.
I agree with past me. All of those thoughts came back to me this time too. I just liked it a little bit less (or I've become stricter with the way I rate things, I suppose).
King says in his introduction that as soon as he started publishing as Bachman he was getting letters asking if Bachman was really Stephen King. I don't think he's lying, but I can't believe anyone read Rage and thought "this reads like Stephen King". Maybe they noticed some superficial similarities with Carrie. The subject matter isn't a million miles away, since both are about angry, disaffected teenagers taking revenge on their school. But they're almost inverses of each other. Carrie builds towards its moment of violence, while Rage opens with the shooting and then goes flat. Tonally they couldn't be more different.
King started writing this in 1966, long before Carrie. He says it's not quite old enough for him to think of it as juvenilia, and he'd obviously reworked it by the time he tried to get it published in 1972, two years before Carrie came out. I think it's the blueprint for Carrie in a lot of ways.
What I found most interesting this time round is that King seems to have hidden little hints to his identity in the text. Early on there's a passage about Donald Westlake writing his Richard Stark books under a pseudonym, and I'm fairly sure that wasn't in the original draft. My evidence form this is scant; mainly it's that there's also a reference to John Travolta in here. Nobody knew who John Travolta was in 1966, and he wasn't much better known in 1972 either, so that has to be a later addition. And Travolta's second film role was, of course, in Carrie. I suspect King was mostly amusing himself. I can't imagine anyone in the 70s picking up on any of it, because stylistically this just doesn't feel like King. A lot of that comes down to the first-person narration, which he rarely uses, and which at this point he'd never used at all in his novels.
So did I enjoy it? Yes, sort of. It reads like juvenilia to me, whatever King says. It's very straightforward and very simple, and the situation never feels real. The characters don't talk or behave the way anyone would with a classmate standing at the front of the room holding a gun. Charlie is a deeply unpleasant protagonist. He's a bit like Carrie in that he's an outsider lashing out, except that he's also incredibly full of himself. He delivers long monologues to his captive audience about his life, his trauma, his sexual traumas. In places it reads like a violent Catcher In The Rye.
The attitudes to sex are hilarious, to be fair. There are several men in this book who are absolutely horrified by the very idea of oral sex, and I couldn't stop laughing at that.
It's my least favourite King novel of the read-through so far, though it's still good in places. You can see the strength of his prose here, even if it's a bit all over the place. But I don't really know what point Rage is trying to make, and if nobody had ever worked out that Bachman was King, I don't think his bibliography would be any weaker without it.
This is fine, but the fact that I needed my reading journal to remember what I thought of it two years ago says a lot. It's forgettable, and I don't think it earns or deserves its notoriety.