My #stephenking #readathon with @ame9022 and @wendysallison has moved on to RAGE, the first of the Bachman Books, the novels that Stephen King released early in his career under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

This was a hard book to read, given the current state of gun violence in schools in our country, and seems very prescient in a way. The book follows one afternoon in a Maine high school, when student Charlie Decker kills his algebra teacher and takes the class hostage. What follows is an alternating narration of Charlie's troubled childhood with secrets held by the students in the class, as well as Decker's taunting of the school officials and police involved in trying to apprehend him.

The whole thing culminates with the students in the class turning on Ted Jones, the only student in the classroom who eventually doesn't seem to want to be there of his own volition. They beat Jones into unconsciousness and Decker gives himself up, and that's basically the story. Written when SK was in high school, and slightly cleaned up to be published under the Bachman alias, I feel it tries to be more ambitious that its capable of being. Given our current state of affairs with gun violence in schools, I'm sure I also read this with a slight bias against the story from the onset. I'm also fairly certain that this will be one of those books that I'm never going to feel a reason to revisit again.

King eventually let this book fall out of publication after it was discovered in the locker of Michael Carneal, the 14-year-old who opened fire on his fellow students at Heath High School in 1997.

#stephenking #horror #rage #richardbachman #thebachmanbooks #bachmanbooks #horrorbooks #horrorbookstagram #bookstagram #book #bookworm #booksbooksbooks #bookreview #frommybookshelf #frommybookshelfblog ( )

This reads just as I expected it to – very early Stephen King. It’s weird, it’s graphically violent, it f***s with your head, but it has a lame wtf ending and is not quite absorbing enough to prevent the reader from thinking how unlikely it is that real people would behave this way. Not the murderous main character, of course, but the other students who become complicit as he holds them hostage. The MC is unfortunately all too plausible. King has said that he started writing this book as a teenager, and that he drew from his own angst, loneliness, confusion, and, yes, rage in writing it. And several real-life teenagers identified so strongly with it that they drew inspiration from the novel in committing their own school shootings. Which is why this novel has been allowed to go out of print.

My own copy is part of a tatty second-hand paperback of The Bachman Books, a monstrously sized four novel collection. I read this for the 2018 Halloween Bingo square Genre: Horror: anything that fits into the horror genre. If a boy going on a school shooting rampage and setting up his fellow students to turn on one another in their own fear and rage isn’t horror, I don’t know what is. ( )

I suppose some hubbub has been made about this book. I started reading Stephen King recently, and have been reading his stuff in order, mainly because I learned that the first book I read, 11-22-63, made references to IT. So I didn't have a particular interest in this book and expected to dislike it more than I did. I thought the same about Carrie (which I ended up liking quite a bit), and this book shares some themes, like bullying.

This is a dark coming-of-age and horror novel in disguise, and not for the reason you would think. The reason I chose 3 stars instead of 4 is because I didn't fully buy or believe that ultimate horror. In the end, this book probably didn't need to be about a school shooting--without that, there is the central and classic story of kids of different social groups being forced together. Having just finished The Shining recently, this seemed less polished, but it was also written in first person. ( )

This was not what I had been expecting, however, it was very disturbing. ( )

I knew this book was pulled from publication by Stephen King and it's easy to understand why. That being said, I enjoyed it more than I had expected. This book had great characters and could have been greatly expanded upon on that alone. I believe he wrote this in high school which makes it all the more remarkable. Bit of a revenge fantasy but an interesting and short book. ( )