The Bachman Books - Rage and Roadwork
A few things happened in the past week that put Richard Bachman at the forefront of my mind. Not long ago my partner asked me to recommend a Stephen King book for her to read, as she's never read anything by him but knows I'm a fan. I initially was going to give her either The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon or Joyland, but a few days ago she finished reading The Hunger Games and also happened to ask whether I could recommend something similar that was a bit more adult. The upshot was that I dug out a copy of The Long Road for her, which she's currently thoroughly enjoying.
While I was looking for that book I found my copy of The Bachman Books, which is old enough that it contains Rage. I also found my old reading journal from 2012, and in flicking through that I discovered that it contained my notes from the first time I ever read The Long Walk. What a coincidence. That paperback of the Bachman novels has been sitting on the shelf opposite my bed for a few nights now and I keep looking at it and thinking I should make time to read it.
It's likely that the book would eventually have become part of the furniture, as things tend to do - but one evening while we were reading in bed my partner asked why King had chosen to write as Bachman, and how it had been discovered that Bachman was a pseudonym. I didn't actually know the answer to the second half of that question, so I pulled up Wikipedia and eventually learned that Misery had been intended as a Bachman book as well (which, now that I know it, makes a lot of sense). I had just finished reading my last book when I learned this and I decided that I wanted to re-read Misery, but I didn't have it to hand. I did, however, have The Bachman Books to hand, so it seemed that the time had finally come to read Rage.
Rage is quite a controversial novel, because it's the story of a school shooting from the point of view of the shooter. I think we all know that America's relationship with guns is deeply fucked up, and really that's always been true, but it's something that continues to get worse over time. There had been 145 school shootings in the USA in the 77 years of the 20th century at the time Rage was published. In the 45 years since then there have been a further 669. There have been 199 this year alone. Part of the controversy of the book comes from the fact that the shooter at the 1997 Heath High School shooting had a copy of Rage in his locker, and it was this event that prompted King to remove the book from print.
The book itself - the first Bachman book - doesn't really read like a Stephen King novel. It's entirely written in first person, and it lacks a lot of the rhythm of language and the sense of being told a story that are the hallmarks of King's fiction for me. I assume this was a deliberate attempt to write something that wouldn't be immediately identified as King. That said, there are still signs there if you look for them. King likes to make us feel sympathy for his villains, or even to make villainous people his protagonists. We'd probably identify Charlie Decker as something approaching an incel these days (though he's not celibate and the book is weirdly horny) and I think modern audiences would struggle to gain any sympathy for this sort of character, or to want to gain any sympathy for him. But King does a decent job of putting us in his shoes and making us understand, if not empathise, the vile actions he decides to carry out.
In a lot of ways the reader of Rage mirrors the other children in the class with Charlie. He shoots and kills two teachers and then simply sits there with the other kids, sharing stories about sexual awakenings and waiting for the situation to resolve itself. Nobody seems overly upset about what's happening - the one character who does is roughly beaten and shamed by the rest of the class - and everyone seems a little excited by what's going on and how it's going to play out. It's an interesting commentary on the way we spectate violence, both in fiction and in the media when we see real-world atrocities on TV, and the way in which we're able to innure ourselves to it.
I originally intended to read Rage and write a review here as I've been doing, but I liked it enough that I immediately moved on to Roadwork and I figured I'd just write about them both at the same time. Rage, in some ways, feels like a debut novel despite being King's fourth book. It's got that urgency that a lot of debuts possess, which makes up for some structural issues and weaknesses in the prose. Roadwork comes four years later and is King's ninth book (and the third Bachman book), and the difference is vast.
Roadwork is really peak cocaine-era King, and it reads exactly like cocaine-era King. If you'd handed me this book without any cover I think I would have identified it as a Stephen King novel almost immediately, and I'm not at all surprised that somebody eventually figured out the connection. If I'm surprised about anything it's that he was able to publish another book under the Bachman name before that happened.
Thematically Roadwork shares some space with Rage (and although I haven't yet read The Running Man I think it's interesting that that book shares some thematic space with The Long Walk - it's like he wrote two sets of companion novels). The lens is firmly on American gun violence and drives men - specifically white men - to take up arms against their communities. Where the violence in Rage is the product of a confused, deeply unwell teenager, the violence in Roadwork flows out of a man struggling to adapt to a changing world, who feels unable to express himself emotionally and only has violence as an outlet. It's really a book about toxic masculinity, as well as being about the way capitalism grinds people under its wheels. It actually reminded me of Network (1976) in a lot of ways.
Roadwork is a much better novel than Rage. I've often thought that although King is "the master of horror" he's really a thriller writer at heart, and Roadwork does a lot of work to support that claim. This is a pure thriller, and I think it's immediately become one of my favourites of his novels. He takes his time to develop his characters and the situation, we start to really care for Bart and want him to succeed even though what he's planning is atrocious, but we always know that we're on a timeline and that the inevitable conclusion is... well, inevitable. As the final days ticked down and I could see that I only had 20 pages left to go I found myself pausing after every chapter just to extend the time I spent in the book, because I didn't want it to end.
I have a lot of books that I want to get through this year but I'm definitely adding the remaining Bachman novels to my list as well, because these were both very good.
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